My good friend and co-founder at Octabox, Adam Benayoun, has finally launched his personal blog after talking about it for a long time. Adam has a sharp business and marketing mind, so if you have any interest in hearing some edgy advice about Internet business development and guerrilla marketing, subscribe to his feed.

Javascript is a very mysterious language. Its prototypical inheritance structure and its function == object == function concepts are quite different compared to standard OO languages. As I did with PHP, I try my best to learn best good practices by studying frameworks I like, and in Javascript’s case that would be jQuery.

I had believed I figured out most of the conventions used in the jQuery source code, however a recent addition has been bugging me and I could not find a reasonable explanation for it - I’m talking about the mysterious semi-colons appearing at the beginning of some of the source files in the library. What is its purpose? Does it make the closure invisible to giant robots from outer space? I had no leads to go on.

This blog post by the jQuery.rule team however, reveals the truth about the semi-colon debacle - apparently they’re used for safe file concatenation (string join). Well that’s a load off my chest. You learn something new every day.

In related news, jQuery UI 1.5 has been officially released, says the jQuery enquirer. jQuery 1.5 is an extensive UI oriented extension to jQuery, and version 1.5 bring forth many improvements such as a tighter API, an effects library called enchant, a skinning mechanism and plenty of bug fixes. I’m just excited they finally updated their documentation, as I’ve been using it for a while going only by source code.

A common (web) interface feature is to divide a long list of items into numbered pages, a technique called pagination. I’ll describe in brief some shortcuts I use with Zend_Db_Select to retrieve the row count and calculate the number of pages for complicated queries.
Read more …

Providing an RTE (Rich Text Editor or WYSIWYG editor) in CMS applications is considered standard nowadays. It allows non-technical content editors to format content and add media without having to learn HTML/CSS or specific CMS markups (such as BBcode or wiki markup).

There are several problems with most RTE packages that somewhat limit their effectiveness - They produce non-standards compliant HTML markup (using FONT tags and Tables heavily), and they are usually a relatively heavy download (~150kb packed). For a site weighing at around 50kb-60kb integrating a 150kb RTE is a painful decision.

WYMEditor attempts to provide a standards-compliant light-weight alternative, that also shows you the type of markup that is being edited (such as Header, Paragraph etc.). It removes the ability to hand select styles such as colors and borders, instead forcing the editor to use style sheets to separate markup from styling. It’s an interesting approach and one that I hope will catch on.

For some more in depth comparison of RTE’s read this overview from Standards Schmandards.