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Surfs Up!

I have been playing with the jQuery animate functionality a bit today and it occurred to me that jQuery would likely be the perfect library to build a browser based game on top of..

I did a little browsing about the web, and sure enough.. someone thought of it before me.

The games I would want to create would be less animated than this one.. but I could totally see a Masters of Orion remake as a browser based game using the jQuery library..   Or any number of other turn based games..  You could even make them multiplayer fairly easily..

As computers get faster, and as browser trend towards threaded javascript engines.. Why the hell not?! At this point I think it would be just as easy/difficult to create a game via a webbrowser as it would via any other medium..

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Example Windows

So as part of my on-going exploring and learning of jQuery I want to create a window system.  This will let me explore the wonderful world of jQuery as well as create something functional and useful for my work project.

This window system will need to be dragable, droppable, completely resizable via all standard and expected methods.  It will need to be able to have x number of configurable buttons within the border both left and right, have other customizable data within the top header..

I want to make it so that each window is basically a container, and thus can contain anything.. including other windows.

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Lightbox Test Image

I have been playing with the javascript library jQuery for a couple days now.. My intent is to learn the ins and out’s of it for a project at work.  So far I like what I am seeing.

I need to learn a “best practices” as there are many ways to do things in jQuery and I am very likely going about some of it incorrectly..  But, there is only one way to try things and that’s to jump off the deep end!  So far it’s cake.. Something I have wanted for my site for a while now was a lightbox implementation.  And while WordPress has quite a few lightbox like plugins, I thought it would be interesting to create my own using jQuery such that ANY link (on any website) with an attribute of rel=”lightbox” would be opened as a lightbox. This is the file I’m actively developing on;

http://rsow.com/files/jquery.lightbox.js

And the image above will be my lightbox test image for the time being.  Clicking the image will close the lightbox. Read more…

Well as some of you know I have been working on a joint WordPress MU and Invision Power Board theme based on the joomla theme Chromatophore.. I thought I would give an update — It’s going well all things considered, but its taking me a little longer than I had for seen to get the color chooser logic working correctly.

You can see my progress here:

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

I’ve run into some interesting javascript foibles that I have had to deal with and have also taken this opportunity to start on my own javascript toolbox.

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Code obfuscators will strip out the unnecessary characters like white space, tabs, newlines and comments. The modern flock of javascript obfuscators will also go through and replace every command and variable in the file with some random key that points to an array which then gets eval’d back out at run time. Generally speaking the code you see in an obfuscated javascript file looks like completely gobbledygook which is sorta the point.

My stance on it is simple; Don’t do it — If you ever catch me encoding or obfuscating my javascript, come kick me square in the jimmy.. I simply cannot abide by people who think they need be secretive with javascript.. And lets be completely honest here, that’s what it’s about. Read more…

The theme that this theme is based on, “Oceans Mist” had a number of problems that I wont go into.. however one of the biggies was its inability to correctly display archives.

Basically if you had any more than 10 items (or however many you have your WP set up to display in the admin area) they just wouldn’t show up. There was no way to page back through those archives. This is lame, and I’m fixing it.

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