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Welcome to the David Walsh Blog. I'm a MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, CSS, and PHP Web Developer located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Please contact me if I can make your experience on my website better.

Demos & Downloads

MooTools Plugin: Event.Mock

Those of you who visit this blog often know that I have a certain love for the simple things: simple CSS enhancements, simple PHP scripts, and most importantly, simple JavaScript plugins. One plugin that recently caught my attention was Arieh Glazer Event.Mock plugin. Event.Mock is a tiny MooTools plugin (essentially just a small function; not a MooTools class) that does exactly what it says: provides a Mock event for easy use with Element.fireEvent.

Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips

The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below:

Create a Twitter AJAX Button with MooTools, jQuery, or Dojo

There's nothing like a subtle, slick website widget that effectively uses CSS and JavaScript to enhance the user experience.  Of course widgets like that take many hours to perfect, but it doesn't take long for that effort to be rewarded with above-average user retention and buzz.  One of the widgets I love is Twitter's "Follow" button.  Let me show you how you can implement this functionality with three popular JavaScript toolkits:  MooTools, jQuery, and Dojo.

Create a Dynamic Flickr Image Search with the Dojo Toolkit

The Dojo Toolkit is a treasure chest of great JavaScript classes.  You can find basic JavaScript functionality classes for AJAX, node manipulation, animations, and the like within Dojo.  You can find elegant, functional UI widgets like DropDown Menus, tabbed interfaces, and form element replacements within Dijit.  In DojoX you can find charting libraries, special data stores, vector graphic helpers, and much more.

Dijit’s TabContainer Layout: Easy Tabbed Content

One of Dojo's major advantages over other JavaScript toolkits is its Dijit library.  Dijit is a UI framework comprised of JavaScript widget classes, CSS files, and HTML templates.  One very useful layout class is the TabContainer.  TabContainer allows you to quickly create a tabbed content layout with minimal effort.  Keep reading to see what you can create in just 10 minutes!

Image Reflections with CSS

Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image.  The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves.  Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without having to modify original images.  The minds behind WebKit have their own idea behind image reflection:  pure CSS.

Create a Context Menu with Dojo and Dijit

Context menus, used in the right type of web application, can be invaluable.  They provide shortcut methods to different functionality within the application and, with just a right click, they are readily available.  Dojo's Dijit frameworks provides an easy way to create stylish, flexible context menus in just minutes.

Create a Simple Dojo Accordion

Let's be honest:  even though we all giggle about how cheap of a thrill JavaScript accordions have become on the web, they remain an effective, useful widget.  Lots of content, small amount of space.  Dojo's Dijit library provides an incredibly simply method by which you can add accordions to your website.  Let's take a look at how we can implement a Dojo accordion!

CSS Triangles

I was recently redesigning my website and wanted to create tooltips.  Making that was easy but I also wanted my tooltips to feature the a triangular pointer.  I'm a disaster when it comes to images and the prospect of needing to make an image for every color tooltip I wanted made me rethink my redesign.  Lucky for me, MooTools Core Developer Darren Waddell shared with me a great trick:  CSS triangles.  Using pure CSS you can create cross-browser compatible triangles with very little code!