Monthly Archives: December 2009

Automatically Scroll Web Pages With jQuery

You’re probably already aware that you can create “anchors” by giving an empty <a> element a name, and then pointing another link to #thename.

But what if you want something a little more…elegant?

The ScrollTo jQuery plugin allows you to make the page scroll to any point on the page, be it an element with a specific ID, an arbitrary screen coordinate, or even a percentage. By default the page will just jump down to the target point, but you can specify a scroll speed parameter in order to make the page actually scroll.

jQuery().scrollTo('#mydiv', 400);

The minified file is tiny, and the functionality is exceedingly useful for pages that have a lot of dynamic elements.

The Twitter API is For Twitter

Scott Gilbertson of Webmonkey’s MonkeyBites blog has an interesting post about the Twitter API, more specifically, on how some blog software providers are “borrowing” Twitter’s programmer interface to enable clients such as Tweetie to update your blog. Twitter’s API has spawned hundreds of mashups…

Using WordPress Template Tags Safely

Have you ever downloaded a WordPress theme that had support for a specific plugin built-in? When you installed the plugin the theme recognized that the plugin was activated and adjusted itself to accommodate. If you were to deactivate the plugin, the theme would gracefully…

What Will Apple Do With Lala.com?

Apple recently acquired Lala, an interesting music service that promotes the idea of streaming music. Lala lets you sample music from their catalog, and then offers the choice to download songs for $0.79 apiece or purchase the right to stream it as much as…

BlogBuzz December 26, 2009

Twitter’s “Contributors” System: Phase One of Their Revenue Model

Twitter is currently developing a new “Contributors” system that will allow multiple users to post to the same Twitter account. Mashable has the screenshots and details about the upcoming feature, and the API developer mailing list has info about the new API calls. Ordinary…

Internet Explorer Should be Powered by WebKit

There, I said it. If Microsoft were to switch from their proprietary “Trident” rendering engine to an open source solution such as WebKit or Mozilla’s Gecko, it would do far more than simply save designers headaches. It would save Microsoft money and development time,…

Modifying The Contextual Help Menu in WordPress

Starting in version 2.7, WordPress has a pull-down “Help” menu in the upper-right corner of the screen, often joined by another menu for configuring display options for the page in question. By default the “Help” menu doesn’t do much. It gives some useful pointers…

WordPress 2.9 is Now Available: Backup and Upgrade!

WordPress 2.9 is now available. The new version includes plenty of new features on both the user and developer sides, including a global “trash can” for posts and comments, basic image editor, rel=canonical support, native support for post thumbnails (should your theme activate the…

BlogBuzz December 19, 2009