Older blog entries for jbaker (starting at number 5)

New Site Design!

The previous one left me unsatisfied. This one looks much better in my opinion and is XHTML Strict Validating and CSS 2.1 validating. Comments on it?

Syndicated 2008-07-16 12:41:08 from Baker Designz

A New Project,

I’ve begun full-on development on a new project, Project Moji. This project will be open-source, GPL licensed,

with a heavy implementation of Prototype/Scriptaculous in the UI.

Basically, it will be a photo site, with microblogging, and some social networking features such as messaging.

It is ,  and will continue to be 100% OOP PHP.

Anyone interested in helping development or testing, email me at justin [at] bakerdesignz.com

Syndicated 2008-07-04 17:23:36 from Baker Designz

Why is Prototypejs so great?

For one, it’s no doubt the easiest framework out there. You can use $(’element’) instead of document.getElementById(element). I know that I’m lazy and I prefer using this :).
And going off of an example on protypejs.org, $(’comments’).show() will take an element with the id “comments” and show it if it was previously hidden.

JSON ( JavaScript object notation ) is a fast alternative to XML for transporting data via api’s that is commonly used by many sites such as Vimeo and Twitter . Prototype has a great JSON encoding and parsing support. Used in conjuction with the built it Ajax capabilities that Prototype has, Ajax is relatively easy .

Oh yeah, that reminds me of  how great Prototype handles Ajax. It offers a simple cross-browser way to address ajax. How about: new Ajax.Request(’/some_url’, { method:’get’ }) ? I would much rather type 3-7 lines for an Ajax function that 20 plus that does the same thing.

I’m not even going to discuss Jquery here. That’s for another day, another post.

-Justin B

Syndicated 2008-06-29 21:08:10 from Baker Designz

Bigger is not always better!

I just changed Bakerracingtech.com to use 3 files ( besides CSS,images,javascript). 6,641 bytes total.
Aren’t Dynamic pages + cruft-free URL’s the best?

Syndicated 2008-06-28 15:01:21 from Baker Designz

Prototype JS

So after doing a little bit of exploration in javascript frameworks yesterday, I found out how easy prototype makes it.

Ajax is easy as could be, and you address element id’s with $(id) as compaired to document.getElementById(’id’).

I wish I was smart enough to make my own framework, I’ve got some learning to do, but I think I got the idea.

I haven’t figured out how to extend the DOM so that you can use $( instead of document.getElementById, but I’m working on it!

Any Ideas?
Update: June 26,2008
Kangax pointed out to me this:

  
function $(id) {
return document.getElementById(id);
}

I feel really stupid now for not seeing this earlier.

-Justin B

Syndicated 2008-06-26 12:59:41 from Baker Designz

After what's been done in the last 5 years, I have one question. What will happen in the next 5 years? The sky is the limit for the future. It's like this analogy: When you were 10 you thought you were mature, when you turned 15 you thought you were more mature and realized you weren't mature when you were 10, and so on and so on.

I can't even begin to fathom what the web will be like in 5 years.