What’s on the menu?

Yeah, I really just typed that. But, it is a very valid question if you think of it right? I mean, at first glance you sometimes can’t tell just what is on the menu because of the wonder that are drop downs. A space saver and organization tool that many menus employ to help us find just what is on the menu in a friendly timely fashion. The question then becomes, how does one emulate this behavior? When I first began working in web development I remember searching like crazy to find out how to make a drop down navigation menu, and so I am now writing my own for, hopefully, others to search like crazy for!

So this tutorial is how to create a simple drop down menu using jQuery. Alright let’s drop down in and get going.

So this is a short post I am making as a minor addition to my last tutorial on Creating an Ajax Contact Form with jQuery. There was a great question comment left that I did not think to address, and I think it would be helpful to others so this addendum is to answer that.

Answer what?

Ajax is cool. I mean, as long as you use it when practical and necessary, the benefits both visual and experience wise are very evident. The days of submitting a form and being sent to a new page just to have to navigate back to where you were are passed, and sending information without page reloads is a nice touch to add to your site. You do however want to make sure you are not “Ajaxing” your entire site, but hey this is just a contact form, so let’s go make a cool one!

I have been wanting to make a jQuery plugin for a while, and recently got the opportunity to guest write a post at amberweinberg.com and thought a tutorial would be a great addition. So I had one stone, and two birds…You know what happened next right?

Exactly! A tutorial on how you can build your own jQuery plugin! I think it is great one to get you started out with any plugin development, and it is even pretty useful I think. Simply add your usernames and/or URLs of your favorite social networking sites and then BAM! The plugin creates a list, links and even icons for your ease of display!

Please head over HERE! and check it out, comment, download, poke fun, make suggestions tell your friends and anything else you can think of!

Thanks for checking it out, now go read the tutorial!

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In the battle of text editors, Textmate continues to come out on top for me, and I hope for you as well. The sheer versatility of the application when it comes to anything text edit related is the reason so many of us cannot leave the editor even though its updated release may have been lost with Duke Nukem.

One of my absolute favorite parts of Textmate is the ability to make custom snippets to do, quite literally, whatever you want. In fact the other day I wrote a command to make me a cup of coffee. It worked flawlessly, but sadly I can’t show you that one, as it is still top secret hush-hush. But, what we can do here today is learn how to make fun little snippets that support text overwriting and tab stops! What does that mean?? Exactly, read on…