Software Developer, Media Nut, and Proud Father of Two

My oh my. I moved my sites to my VPS in August, with this site being among the first. Everything was hunky dory until today, when a plethora of hits came from StumbleUpon.com, a link sharing website. Someone on there decided to share a link to the jQuery Autotab plugin. I don't have an accurate number, but I have several pages worth of Drupal logs showing hits from that site for today and I suspect that it is the cause of my VPS' sluggish behavior. I've enabled caching, so hopefully I won't have any more problems, but if you people do that again, well... I don't know what I'll do. I'm working on getting an entry ready for jQuery Autotab on SourceForge.net, so maybe that's the best route to go.

After receiving some great feedback, I have finally worked my way into updating Autotab with some key fixes and handy new features. Before I release this as a final version, I'd like additional testing and critiques to be done to make v1.1 final and release it to the masses, so please download, test, and critique! Detailed descriptions can be found in the source file.

I put a notice of sorts in about two weeks ago that I was looking for another job. I had a few promising leads at the time, but they have ultimately lead to disappointment, and with one, utter frustration. Early in June I was contacted by a job recruiter (on a Saturday of all days) about a six month contract to hire position with Chevron as a front end developer, with a little bit of server side. One of the requirements was that the developer be able to hand code valid XHTML, CSS, ASP and JS code; so they wanted a person that didn't depend on a WYSIWYG editor. This was perfect because I hate using programs that write my code for me and I enjoy doing front end development. By the end of our conversation the job recruiter and I were convinced that I was exactly what Chevron wanted. Or so we thought.

Update:

Autotab has a new beta release. Read more here. Documentation changes will be forthcoming to this page once 1.1 has been tested and approved, but until I'm happy with the performance, this page will use 1.1b but contain 1.0 documentation.

Autotab is a jQuery plugin that provides auto-tabbing and filtering on text fields in a form. Once the maximum number of characters has been reached within a defined text fields, the focus is automatically set to the defined target of the element. Likewise, clearing out the text field's content by pressing backspace eventually places the focus on the elements previous target.

Rotating banners are commonly used throughout the web and can have an unlimited variation to their layout and design. My example illustrates how you can easily and effectively have animation like capabilities without having to incorporate Flash. Off course, having Flash offers benefits that jQuery, or JavaScript for that matter, can compare with without suffering some kind of a performance hit.

The example below used to be on Computrols' homepage until they replaced it with a Flash version that now has more involved animation. The JavaScript could likely be optimized, but it gets the job done.

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Computrols Building Automation Systems

A simple, yet attractive sliding menu. With jQuery, the menu can slide, fade, grow and simply appear, which is where the true beauty of this script lies. There is an issue with Internet Explorer and the CSS used for this menu (there is a large gap between some links), but I'm just a tad lazy at the moment to make it compatible with the Garland theme in Drupal.

This is my sandbox, where I toy around with different ideas, mainly involving jQuery, a powerful and effective JavaScript framework. You will find small samples of different ideas and scripts that accomplish various tasks. Select any of the links below to try out the new toys I have worked on. It is likely that you will see one or more of these little toys in your site in the future. For now I have a simple list of toys I'm working on, but hopefully I will get them up soon!

jQuery Autotab Plugin