Gareth Stevens

“Gareth Stevens is one of the world’s most respected library and educational publishers. Our publishing program focuses on nonfiction titles carefully written and designed to align with current curriculum standards and objectives. Our mission is to lead children to a lifetime of learning. We do this through high-quality, high-interest books for every age group.”

Double check your syntax. FireFox is more forgiving of errors than IE when it comes to the CSS code. For example: [sourcecode language=”css”]background:transparent url(images/check.gif)no-repeat 0 6px;[/sourcecode] Will work as intended within FireFox but not IE even though there is no space between the URL declaration and the “no-repeat” parameter. Change that code to: background:transparent url(images/check.gif) […]

Google Static Maps

This is a nice utility for embedding a static version of a Google Maps location. For example, if you didn’t want to actually embed the fully functional Google Map but just an image of that map you can use this to dynamically generate it based on URL parameters. That means if the address changes or you […]

CSS Reset Techniques

Here’s a new article on MSDN that gives a brief history of various CSS Reset techniques (clearing base styles in order to avoid cross-browser differences). The Ins and Outs of CSS Resets Also, as pointed out in that article there is a Google Code hosted version of the HTML5 compliant Meyer’s CSS Reset script. The […]

This is a nice little plugin for easily adding auto-complete functionality to form fields. All it looks for is a datasource formatted as JSON. I’ve put an example here using PHP to access a dinosaur name database returning the previously stored values. https://www.hereswhatidid.com/coding/autocomplete/ The project site is here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/ jQuery Code: [sourcecode lang=”javascript”](function($) { $(function() […]

It’s always worth looking up a function that you may be using heavily to see if there’s a faster way to call it. For example, getting and setting variables using the data() function within jQuery can vary greatly depending on how you call it. Here’s a site that compares the speed differences in various browsers: […]

Have a large .js file that you’d like to bring down to size? Check out the Google-hosted Closure compiler: http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home It let’s you specify some basic rules for the compression as well as creates the actual resulting .js file if you don’t want to bother with copy/paste for the results.