dawnerd » user interface

Open Source jQuery Plugin – AjaxPages

Troy Whiteley — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:55:28 +0000

AjaxPages allows you to serve up full pages completely with ajax. This is very useful if you want to build a site that has a music player running across page loads, but don’t want to use frames. This technique can be found at TheSixtyOne.

All internal links should be in hash format. Example: instead of linking to filename.html, you would link to #/filename.html.

If you have clean urls on, the hash is almost not noticeable. Example: domain.com/#/profile/username

To get started with AjaxPages, get the files from the Google Code trunk. Example files are included. That should be enough to get you started. The plugin is very lightweight and fairly simple so it should not give you any problems.

If you need help, please leave a comment and I will personally help you out.

Open Source jQuery Plugin – Custom Radio and Checkboxes

Troy Whiteley — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:15:40 +0000

I got fed up with the numerous amounts of plugins that handle custom checkboxes and radio inputs that I decided to create my own. Typically, the plugin will create html for you in which you an style. But you also have to pass in url’s for images that will be used for the various states.

The plugin I created, bltcheckbox, allows you to use any html and css. The only options you pass to the plugin are whether it’s a checkbox, or a radio input.

For code samples and documentation, please check out the code code page here.

Ajax Username Validation with The Most Popular JS Frameworks

Troy Whiteley — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:59:02 +0000

It seems like every site these days uses some form of Ajax to validate form fields. One thing I cannot stand is websites that do not use Ajax to check usernames (or other data) as you type. Because a lot of sites are lacking this one feature, I thought it would be nice to throw together a few examples of how to do it correctly with the most popular of JS frameworks.

You can view the source of the examples to see how they are done.

Ajax Username Validation with Prototype
Ajax Username Validation with jQuery

note: more examples will come in time. I am currently reading the mootools, dojo, and mochikit.

The only PHP code you will need is as follows:


include("../db.php");
$name = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9-]", "",mysql_real_escape_string(strip_tags(trim($_GET['name']))));
if(empty($name)) die();

$sql = "SELECT `username` FROM `common_usernames` WHERE `username` = '$name'";
$query = mysql_query($sql,$db);

if(!mysql_num_rows($query))
{
	die(''.$name.' is available!');
}
else
{
	die(''.$name.' is taken!');
}