Although I have a hand in the majority of categories, JavaScript is something I have a keen interest in and was asked to write a short tutorial on a JS related subject.

It took me a while to think of something to base the blog post on, but it eventually coincided well with something I needed for another project I am currently working on.

We’ve all seen the use of pre-filled input areas, where a faded description or hint of what should be entered by the user is inserted into the input and disappears when it is clicked on.

I am a big jQuery fan, so writing a plug-in to solve the issue I had seemed like a good solution, so wrote the first draft of my plug-in whilst trying to describe what was happening along the way.

Hopefully what I’ve written is fairly simple to follow but it is my first attempt at writing a tutorial of this length and detail, so if you have any hints or comments (aka constructive criticism) then do let me know .

Head over to SixCrayons and have a scan through my tutorial on writing a simple jQuery input hint plug-in, or even just browse through the other categories.

We first saw a glimpse of Fubra World at the end of 2007, after Nick put together a simple flash animation of a small town that he had sketched and added some interaction to.

At the end of 2008 it was decided that we would give it a bit of a facelift. The process involved nick re-drawing the town in isometric and myself learning ActionScript 3 to allow for a more interactive presentation.

After many hours spent – most of which outside working day – we finally have something to show for it.

So far it’s been a nice little project that has really allowed me to start getting into Flash and the development of a number of AS3 classes.

There is however still a lot of room for improvement, but it is a vast improvement on the previous version, take a look for yourself by browsing Fubra World now.

Now in year 11, the student – who we shall refer to as B. Haines – had obtained video footage of myself (in costume) and put into practice his new found video editing skills using a trail version of Video Edit Magic to produce “Death of Mr. Box Man”.

Not only was this used towards his GCSE Media Studies, I have more recently found out that it was played at the school during the final year 10 assembly.

Although I am undoubtedly the main star of the show, all credit must go to Nick Haines for the high quality video recording skills, and Ben for his acting, polishing of the final cut, additional textual commentary and great choice of music – nice work guys!

Since then I have found myself purchasing and reading a number of web development related books, whether they be JavaScript, PHP, MySQL or CSS. Each one highlighted something that I either didn’t know or simplified something I may have known already.

The majority of my collection is made up of books from the O’Reilly collection, but I also own a number of the Wrox publications. My current favourite – or should I say most referred to – is the Wrox edition of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers by Nicholas C. Zakas.

One of the most useful features it offers are the comparisons between IE and the DOM, highlighting what is and is not available to you across them both. The many examples provided throughout the book cover numerous situations across all the major browsers and provide a deeper understanding of the differences and how to work around them.

Recommending this book to anyone with an intermediate knowledge of JavaScript is something I would do without hesitation. Having recently lent it to a friend of mine, I have however discovered that it may not be so suitable to those just beginning JS or anyone having little development experience.

The synopsis does explain that the book:

Quickly covers JavaScript basics and then moves on to more advanced topics such as object-oriented programming, XML, Web services, and remote scripting

I am always on the lookout for books of similar nature to this on the subject of JavaScript in order to expand my collection and knowledge, therefore any suggestions or recommendations that you may have are welcomed.

Whilst digging around for a reason he found that there was an inline style of “display: none;” applied to the image although no inline style was visible in the source code, which asked the question of where was it coming from?

As with many development and layout issues in Firefox they often come back to one of the many extensions or add-ons that you have installed – for example wondering why JavaScript isn’t working and then realising that it’s simply because you had disabled it earlier on to ensure your site will work without it enabled :S.

In this case it was found to be that AdBlock was installed, so by either disabling the AdBlock add-on or whitelisting the Fubra site and hitting refresh, all image problems appeared to have been resolved – for now.

A quick solution was applied for anyone visiting the site with AdBlock enabled in order to avoid the hiding of imagery.

For now I’ve renamed the images and it seems to have solved the problem.

I found it very interesting that the AdBlock extension would automatically block localised images simple because they contained the phrase ‘advertising’.

It seems to me that the add-on may be acting a little greedy here and should maybe only exclude images from third party websites containing this phrase or similar phrases if any.

After all, adverts are usually put in place for a reason and in a lot of cases without them it’s unlikely that the site would be there at all.

define: blogger – “The author of a blog”.

Over at Fubra they like to encourage – or nag – all employees to write their own blog and be part of the ever increasing population of online bloggers.

Until now I have been putting off the process of setting up my own blog in the hope that one would just magically appear or allow me to create one with minimum effort.

Thanks to the wonders of Subversion and WordPress I was able to quickly and easily install a blog on my vserver that Fubra have kindly supplied.

It can’t really get much easier than running the following cmd to checkout from the WordPress repository:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/2.3/ .

All that was left was to come up with a quick and simple design to get away from the default template theme.

So there you have it, the kick start to my future in blogging.

Oh, and a quick thank you to my boss Paul for backing me into a corner and pressuring me into this whole blogging malarkey.