My First jQuery Plugin

By mike@mike-miles.com

I had a bit of free time over the last week, so I thought I would try my hand at creating a jQuery plugin.

I call it jQuery.fly

What it does is allows you to create some cool animation effects to any text elements on the page, it also has a few built in effect. Useful? not really, but maybe someone will like it.

Some of the built-in effects are:

• bubbles : makes blue bubbles rise from the bottom of the screen
• blizzard: makes it snow on the page
• explosion: creates an explosion on the page
• fire: produces an ASCII fire on the page

Like I said, it’s supposed to be used for text effects, so you could make all the paragraphs on your page randomly move around when a page is loaded.

you can view an example here.

I’ve posted a more in depth description and download links on my projects page, jQuery Fly.

Working hard

By mike@mike-miles.com

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been quite busy at my job (doing some major web development stuff). I’m going to try to post later this week about a PHP calendar/date class I’ve been building in my freetime (initial tests are showing that for some instances it’ll be up to 4x faster then the ‘date()’ function.) so hopfully you’ll see that later in the week

Most powerful Dev Tool

By mike@mike-miles.com

All developers have a central set of tools (programs, frameworks, plugins, ect) that they rely on, their toolbox so to speak.  But I have found that there is one tool that seems to universal and one of the most powerful… music.

I have found that to most developers (including myself) music is a key component to optimal development.  Music allows you to block out all annoyances when developing, such as co-workers, bosses, street noises, ect…  It can also help when your stressed out or cant figure out a solution.  When ever I get stressed out while coding I always take a break and listen to these two songs:

1. Dont’ Stop Me Now by Queen : Calms me down, reduces the stress
2. It’s a long way to the top by ACDC : gets me energized, makes me feel like a programming rockstar.

After that I can jump right back into coding and solve what ever problem I was stuck on.  And for those times that I just need a bit of a boost, nothing works better then listening to some Disturbed (works better than any energy drink). So my personal preference is rock music (in the word of Joe Dirt ‘I’m a  rocker throu and throu’), but I know its not for everyone (Some developers I know work best while listening to techno music for example) which is why in addition to good music every developer needs a great pair of headphone.  Headphones allow you to blast your music (thus drowning out any distractions) yet not bother anyone around you.  The best the headphones, obviously the better the performance (a developer friend of mine just dropped $150 on a great pair of studio headphones).

So if you are not happy with the performance of you developers, try letting them listen to music I’m sure you’ll see an increase in performance.  And for all you other developers out there, what music really gets you going while developing?

I promise my next post will be about actual development once again (I’m thinking it’ll be about Data mining since I’m working on a personal project that involves it)