Blogging Developer

2 Usability Issues on Date Formating - Choosing the Right Date Format

blogging developer — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:29:00 +0300

While managing my rss subscriptions, I noticed that some websites use confusing date formatting. For example: What date is 12/05/09?

May 12th, 2009
December 5th, 2009
May 9th, 2012

Using Date Formats: MM/DD/YY (common in US), DD/MM/YY (common in Europe) and YY/MM/DD (used in Japan) are really confusing.

Dates used in web sites should be understandable for all cultures. The best practice for date formatting is using month names with 4 digit year. So the right formats for our example are - 12 May 2009 or May 12th, 2009.

It is hard for users to understand if the post is up-to-date or not when displaying day and month information without a year

Second issue about date formatting is displaying day and month information without a year. It is hard for users to understand if the reading is relevant for them. Showing full date enables users to understand if the article/post/site is outdated or not.

Many blogs and websites display dates in confusing or incomplete formats. It is important to display dates in a way that they are complete and understandable in all cultures.

FormToWizard jQuery Plugin - Turn any Web Form into a Powerful Wizard

blogging developer — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:35:00 +0300

FormToWizard jQuery Plugin turns a long web form into a wizard

If you have a large web form with semantically dividable sections, we can say that each section represents a sub task of a larger task of filling the entire web form. In order to increase useability, each sub task can become a step with a description, form fields and navigation that is common for wizard forms – back and next. The entire process can be done in several simple steps.

FormToWizard Plugin works on fieldsets within a form and convert them to wizard steps

This plugin has only 2,3KB and with compression it can be even smaller. It is compatible with all major browsers: FireFox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 8, 7 and 6.

Before FormToWizard jQuery Plugin

After FormToWizard jQuery Plugin

More details about the implementation and jQuery Plugin can be found here.

8 Useful jQuery Calendar, Date Picker and Time Formatting Plugins that You Should Know

blogging developer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0300

jQuery is one of the most popular Javascript library. It’s easy to use, flexible, and most of all there’s a lot of jQuery tutorials and plugins available out which ease the the creation of dynamic effects and web controls. jQuery has become one of the most used JavaScript libraries today and can be found in the core of popular products like Wordpress, joomla and Drupal.

Recently, we reviewed couple of jQuery calendar, datePicker/dateSelector and timestamp formatting plugins. It is time to compile these widely used jQuery date/time plugins in a post. So this post is a collection of amazing jQuery Calendar, DatePicker and timestamp formatting plugins.

1. FullCalendar - jQuery Event Calendar with Drag'n Drop, Ajax Fetching and Google Calendar Integration

FullCalendar is a jQuery calendar plugin that provides full-sized, drag and drop capable calendar. It utilizes Ajax to fetch events on the fly. It is easily configurable to use custom feed format and also has an extension for Google Calendar. The calendar is highly customizable and has support for user event triggering for window resize, loading, day click, event click, event drop, etc.

FullCalendar - jQuery Calendar Plugin with Drag'n Drop and Ajax Capabilities

2. jQuery Weekly Calendar - An Easy to Implement Google Calendar like jQuery Calendar Plugin

jQuery Week Calendar is another jQuery Calendar plugin similar to FullCalendar. It provides a simple and flexible way of including a weekly calendar control in to your web pages. It is an extension of jQuery and jQuery IU plugin. jQuery Week Calendar is similar to Google calendar.

jQuery Week Calendar Plugin - A Google Calendar Like Week Calendar

The plugin is compatible with Firefox 3.x, Safari 3.1+, Internet Explorer 7+ and Google Chrome. The look and feel of the plugin is simple but easily editable by adding stylesheet that overrides colors.

3. jQuery Datepicker Plugin - Highly Configurable Datepicker from jQuery UI

The jQuery UI Datepicker is a highly configurable jQuery datepicker plugin. The date format and language can be formatted, the selectable date ranges can be restricted and optional buttons and other navigation options can be added easily.

jQuery UI's Datpicker Plugin

By default, the datepicker is tied to a standard form input field. Focus on the input opens an interactive calendar in a small overlay. Choosing a date, clicking elsewhere on the page or hitting the Esc key closes the control. If a date is chosen, feedback is shown as the input's value. It can also be used as an inline calendar, by simply attaching the datepicker to a div or span.

jQuery UI's Datpicker Plugin enables multiple month display

4. jQuery Date Range Selector - An Easy to Implement jQuery Date Range Selector Plugin

Filamentgroup's Date Range Picker control simplifies selecting a range of values where the data set is very large or the high or the low end is unknown by "All dates before..." and "All dates after..." links. It also automatically controls the number of calendars needed for choosing a range. For example: you only need one calendar to choose "All dates before", but you need two calendars to select a custom date range.

jQuery Date Range Picker Plugin by FilamentGroup

5. jQuery Multiday Datepicker - jQuery Calendar Plugin for Selecting Consecutive Days/a>

jQuery Multiday Calendar Datepicker Plugin is an animated datepicker calendar for multi-day selection with multi-month display. It allows selection of pre-specified number of consecutive days by providing a sequence of side by side residing months.

jQuery Mutlday Calendar Plugin enables selection of pre-specified number of consecutive days

6. Astonishing iCal like jQuery Calendar Plugin

Astonishing iCal like Calendar is built with CSS and jQuery. It features a lightweight Coda-like effect for event descriptions.

iCal style calendar with jQuery

7. CuteTime - User Friendly, Readable Timestamp Formatting

CuteTime is a jQuery plugin that provides easy conversion of timestamps to formats much cuter. It also has the ability to dynamically update and/or automatically update timestamps on a controlled interval.

While there are other similar tools out there written in JavaScript, PHP and C#, this plugin does exactly what it promisis.

If used as function, a string containing a cuter version of the provided time stamp is returned.

Instead of formal time formatting, Twitter uses more readable timestamp formatting

8. TimeAgo - jQuery Plugin for User Friendly Time Formatting with Multilanguage Support

Timeago makes user-friendly time formatting easier by supporting automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago")

Timeago makes user-friendly time formatting easier by supporting automatically updating fuzzy timestamps.

With Timeago's automatic updating feature, you take full advantage of page caching in your web applications since the timestamp formatting is done in client side. Also, Timeago refreshes timestamps automatically to avoid timestamps dated "1 minute ago" even though the page was opened 10 minutes ago.

Timeago jQuery Plugin can be used via selectors. In this case, it replaces the text of the provided element with a class of timeago and an ISO 8601 timestamp in the title. If used as function, a string containing a formatted version of the provided time stamp is returned.

TinyAccordion - Lightweight JavaScript Based Accordion Control with Nested Item Support

blogging developer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:35:00 +0300

TinyAccordion is a lightweight and powerful JavaScript based accordion control with multi-level, nested accordion control support. The accordion control has an easy to use interface with div based structure.

TinyAccordion - JavaScript based Accordion Control with Nested Item Support

The accordion control has been tested on major browsers and available free of charge.

The TinyAccordion script has recently been updated with a couple of bug fixes, performance tweaks and new features. With the updated version, you can expand a particular section with its index.

More details and an online demo can found here.

SlickMap CSS - Simple Stylesheet for Displaying Sitemaps from HTML Unordered List without Javascript

blogging developer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:24:00 +0300

Since creating better looking sitemaps is quite time consuming, we usually end up having text-based unordered lists that does not look like a sitemap. From now on, you can have a very beautiful and visual site map with nothing more than your standard unordered list and CSS. SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying sitemaps directly from HTML given as unordered list. It allows 3 levels of navigation and additional utility links for LOGIN, CONTACT, ADVERTISE links.

SlickMap CSS is cross-browser and can be customized easily. It enables automation of sitemap design by eliminating the need for additional software.

SlickMap CSS - is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation.

The way data is visualized by SlickMap CSS is impressive. The arrangment, grouping, and color coding of data makes it very easy to identify and find relevant data. Everything in SlickMap is implemented in pure CSS. There is no JavaScript. It’s also very easy to implement and customize. Simply create an HTML file with an unordered set of links and import the slickmap.css file.

You can download the SlickMap CSS and find more details here.

Parse XML with Javascript - jParse: jQuery Plugin for Parsing XML

blogging developer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:58:00 +0300

jParse is a jQuery plugin for parsing XML that was fetched with the jQuery .ajax method. jParse is an easy-to-use and lightweight jQuery plugin which is compatible with:

Firefox 1.5+
Safari 3+
Chrome 3
IE 6+
Opera 9+

jParse: jQeury Plugin to Parse XML on the Client Side.

jParse gives you options for custom output, limit, count of items and the ability to run functions before and after jParse is finished.

jQuery's ajax method does not allow for cross domain AJAX requests; the XML that you would like to parse using jParse must be on the same domain from which you are working. Using jParse is fairly simple and you can easily use it to pull value of an XML node, the value of an attribute of an XML node, or the number of in an XML document.

More details and demo can be found here.

.NET Style String Formatting with jQuery - Javascript Function to Support Token Replacement within a String

blogging developer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:16:00 +0300

Here is a quick jQuery Plugin Announcement:

String concatenation and formatting are common aspects of almost every development effort. However, the combination of single and double quotes, along with escape characters, text, and plus signs (+) can be a bit overwhelming and difficult to remember. The .NET Framework provides a much cleaner approach with the String class's Format method. It allows you to create string values by specifying insertion points for other values as well as special formatting.

String.Format("Hello {0}", "world");

The string formatting approach described above can now be used with Javascript using a jQuery Plugin: .NET STYLE STRING FORMATTING - a simple and clever function to support token replacement within a string.

Given a string like "Hello, {0}" and calling the format function with a single argument like "world".

var result = $.format("Hello, {0}", "world");

The result variable will be set to "Hello, world".

The function will support an arbitrary number of arguments including none. When a token is unused in the string it will be ignored and too many arguments will be ignored.

More details can be found here.

TimeAgo - jQuery Plugin for User Friendly Time Formatting with Multilanguage Support

blogging developer — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:14:00 +0300

Previously, I wrote about User Friendly, Readable Timestamp Formatting with CuteTime - jQuery Plugin. Plugin automatically, changes "2009-11-11 15:33" or "Thu, November 11,2009 15:33PM" type of timestamp formatting into a more user friendly, warmer and more readable time formatting like "2 minutes ago" or "4 days ago".

Another similar jQuery plugin for formatting timestamps is Timeago. Timeago makes user-friendly time formatting easier by supporting automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago")

Timeago makes user-friendly time formatting easier by supporting automatically updating fuzzy timestamps.

Timeago replaces the text of the provided element with a class of timeago and an ISO 8601 timestamp in the title.

Timeago has multilanguage support. Currently, it is available in 18 languages.

More details can be found here...

iPhone Scrolling Experience in Your Browser with jQuery Plugin

blogging developer — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:31:00 +0300

We all love iPhone's user experience. Recently, I have posted about a iCal like jQuery Calendar Plugin which is built with CSS and jQuery featuring a lightweight Coda-like effect for event descriptions. Today, I would like to introduce you another jQuery plugin that simulates iPhone's scrolling experience.

jQuery plugin for iPhone Scrolling Experience

This plugin turns any overflowed block element into a scrollable pane. Clicking and dragging will make the overflowed list scroll, flicking will send the list into a short drift.

You can find more details about the plugin and test it here.

LightBox for Videos - CeeBox: jQuery Plugin for Displaying Flash Videos with an Overlay

blogging developer — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:03:00 +0300

Videobox is a small script that enables showing videos from YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video on the page with an overlay. Unfortunately, this Lightbox for Videos is written for mootools library. In order to display flash on an overlay within the page, VideoBox isn't the option for jQuery Framework users. On the other hand, jQuery plugin Thickbox is nice but doesn't work with flash movies.

CeeBox creates a lightbox-like overlay for images, image, html via ajax and iframe, and flash movies. CeeBox is an easy-to-use plugin: videos will be displayed in a popup simply by adding "ceebox" to a link (for example: to a YouTube movie page link). CeeBox supports popups for Google Video, YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Dailymotion, iFilm, and Facebook videos.

Ceebox - creates a lightbox-like popup overlay for images, image, html via ajax and iframe, and flash movies

You can create gallery next/prev buttons for any type of content images/videos/html by applying ceebox on a parent element with links underneath.

Ceebox handles links automatically:

Links to images are created as image popups
Links to video sites are created as auto-embeded video player popups (supports Google Video, YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Dailymotion, iFilm, Facebook videos and swf files.)
Links to html pages on the same domain are added as ajax Links to html pages on another domain are added as an iframe.
Title attribute is used for the caption/header on the popup.
Galleries are created automatically by applying CeeBox to a parent object with links underneath

You can find more details and play with demos here.

User Friendly, Readable Timestamp Formatting with CuteTime - jQuery Plugin

blogging developer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:28:00 +0300

Formal timestamp formats have already been avoided by most of the online social services. Instead of displaying "2009-11-11 15:33" or "Thu, November 11,2009 15:33PM", they use more user friendly, warmer and more readable time formatting like "2 minutes ago" or "4 days ago".

Instead of formal time formatting, Twitter uses more readable timestamp formatting

While there are other similar tools out there written in JavaScript, PHP and C#, this plugin does exactly what it promisis.

If used as function, a string containing a cuter version of the provided time stamp is returned.

CuteTime jQuery Plugin can be used as a function.

CuteTime jQuery Plugin can also be used via selectors. In this case, it replaces the text of the provided object with CuteTime.

CuteTime jQuery Plugin can also be used via selectors.

You can get more details about the plugin and download it from here.

CSS Based Javascript Free Cross-Browser Pagination with Tooltips

blogging developer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:17:00 +0300

Blogs, forums, online slide presentations etc. mostly use simple previous - next text links for navigation. All other fancy, more useful pagination techniques need Javascript code or images. Yesterday, I came across to a new completely CSS based, Javascript and image free pagination example.

CSS Based Javascript Free Pagination with Tooltips

This cross-browser pagination technique is supported by:

Internet Explorer 6 or higher
Firefox 1.0 or higher
Chrome
Opera
Safari

More details and a demo can be found here.

Google Closure Compiler vs. YUI Compressor - Comparing the Javascript Compression Tools

blogging developer — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:54:00 +0300

I have written couple of articles on Google's Closure Compiler:

In terms of Javascript Compression, the most widely used tools are: JSMIN, the DOJO Compressor, Dean Edwards’ Packer and YUI Compressor. The YUI Compressor is designed to be 100% safe and yield a higher compression ratio than the other tools listed above. That’s why most of the JavaScript Frameworks use YUI Compressor to minimize their Javascript code.

On November 5th, Google announced Closure Compiler for Javascript compression. The strongest part of the Closure Compiler is that it does not only remove whitespace but also it rewrites Javascript Code to make it smaller. It also optimizes your Javascript code to perform better.

In this post, I compared the compression performance of YUI Compressor and Google Closer Compiler using the well-known Javascript Frameworks - Mootools, JQuery and Prototype:

Comparing YUI Compressor and Closure Compiler - the values given in the chart are bytes

Comparing YUI Compressor and Closure Compiler - Compression Percentage

The comparison results show that Google Closure Compiler with advanced selected as compression level minimizes code size about 20-25% more than YUI Compressor by providing nearly 60% compression.

Using Google Closure Compiler with PHP 5

blogging developer — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:17:00 +0300

Recently, I have written a C# wrapper for Google Closure Compiler to use with ASP.NET for on-the-fly JavaScript compression. For those who want to use the Closure Compiler with PHP, Bohuco.net has an article showing how to use the Google Closure Compiler over its RESTful API with PHP5.

$script = file_get_contents('http://www.domain.com/scripts/script.js');
$ch = curl_init('http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/compile');

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'output_info=compiled_code&output_format=text&compilation_level=SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS&js_code=' . urlencode($script));
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

You can find more details on using Closure Compiler with PHP 5 here.

C# Wrapper for Google Closure Compiler - Compressing Javascript Files on-the-fly with ASP.NET and Closure Compiler

blogging developer — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:36:00 +0300

On November 5th, Google released Closure Compiler for Javascript optimization. The strongest part of the Closure Compiler is that it does not only remove whitespace but also rewrites Javascript Code to make it smaller. It also optimizes your Javascript code to perform better. You can find more details and all of its features on my previous article: Closure Compiler – Javascript Compiler by Google.

During my tests, Closure Compiler reduced Javascripts more than 60%. Considering, the size of Javascript files that modern websites have and the reduction before HTTP compression, Closure Compiler is really useful.

Closure Compiler comes with a Java based command line tool and a RESTful API. RESTful API works great and very fast. API can be used with a MSBuild or NAnt script to automatically compress Javascript files.

I wrote a C# wrapper for the Google Closure Compiler:

C# wrapper for the Google Closure Compiler

The Closure Compiler has three compilation levels:

WHITESPACE_ONLY: just removes whitespace and comments from the Javascript
SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATION: performs compression and optimization that does not interfere with the interaction between the compiled JavaScript and other JavaScript. This level renames only local variables.
ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS: achieves the highest level of compression by renaming symbols in your JavaScript. When using ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS compilation you must perform extra steps to preserve references in other Javascript files

Below is an example of using the Google Closure Compiler C# wrapper with ASP.NET

Compress googleClosure = new Compress();
string script = googleClosure(Server.MapPath("~/script.js");

Download Closure.cs

Get Closure.cs

jQuery Multiday Datepicker - jQuery Calendar Plugin for Selecting Consecutive Days

blogging developer — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:42:00 +0300

Recently, we examined two jQuery date picker plugins: jQuery UI DatePicker Plugin and jQuery Date Range Picker Plugin. jQuery UI's Date Picker plugin enables users to select one and only one day from a selectable date range. On the other hand, jQuery Date Range Picker Plugin simplifies selection of a date range.

jQuery Mutlday Calendar Plugin enables selection of pre-specified number of consecutive days

You can find more details about the plugin here.

Closure Compiler - Javascript Compiler by Google - Compress Javascript with Closure Compiler

blogging developer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:29:00 +0300

Yesterday, Google introduced Closure Tools (announcement) to enable easy creation of web applications. The tool set contains: Closure Compiler, Closure Library and Closure Templates.

Closure Compiler is a Javascript optimizer that compiles javascript code into a compact, high performance form. The compiler does more than a standard Javascript compressor. The Closure Compiler reduces the size of your JavaScript files and makes them more efficient, helping your application to load faster and reducing your bandwidth needs. Moreover, it removes dead code, rewrites the code to improve code running speed on browsers' Javascript engines. It also checks syntax, variable references, variable types and warns about Javascript errors.

Closure Compiler by Google - reduces the size of your JavaScript files and makes them more efficient

As mentioned before, Closure compiler is more than a standard Javascript compressor. Using it results having a less buggy and easier to maintain code.

The compiler also offers a Firebug extension, named Inspector, for better debugging.

You can use the Closure Compiler as:

An open source Java application that you can run from the command line.
A simple web application.
A RESTful API.

Closure Compiler by Google does more than removing whitespace.

You can find more details here. Also, tool can be used online at: http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home.

jQuery Date Range Selector - An Easy to Implement jQuery Date Range Selector Plugin

blogging developer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:49:00 +0300

Previously, I wrote about a jQuery Date Picker Plugin from jQuery UI. With minDate and maxDate properties, you can restrict the range of selectable dates with in the DatePicker. However, we sometimes need users to choose a date range. Filamentgroup modified the jQuery UI's Datepicker control and created a new plugin for quickly selecting a date from a list of preset dates/ranges.

jQuery Date Range Picker Plugin by FilamentGroup

Date Range Picker plugin requires jQuery and jQuery UI Datepicker. It also uses the jQuery UI CSS Framework as well as one additional custom CSS file. You can find more details about the plugin here.

jQuery Datepicker Plugin - Highly Configurable Datepicker from jQuery UI

blogging developer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:57:00 +0300

For a couple of days, I have been working on finding the best-looking and the most customizable calendar and datepicker controls. Previously, I wrote about two calendar controls: iCal like Calendar with jQuery and FullCalendar - jQuery Event Calendar with Ajax.

jQuery UI provides abstractions for interaction and animation, advanced effects and themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.

jQuery UI's Datpicker Plugin

You can also use keyboard shortcuts to control the datepicker:

page up/down - previous/next month
ctrl+page up/down - previous/next year
ctrl+home - current month or open when closed
ctrl+left/right - previous/next day
ctrl+up/down - previous/next week
enter - accept the selected date
ctrl+end - close and erase the date
escape - close the datepicker without selection

jQuery UI's Datpicker Plugin enables multiple month display

The jQuery UI Datepicker plugin uses the jQuery UI CSS Framework to style its look and feel, including colors and background textures.

More details can be found here.

jQuery Weekly Calendar - An Easy to Implement Google Calendar like jQuery Calendar Plugin

blogging developer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:37:00 +0300

Previously, I posted about a monthly calendar jQuery Plugin: FullCalendar. FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides full-sized, drag and drop capable calendar. It utilizes Ajax to fetch events on the fly. It is easily configurable to use custom feed format and also has an extension for Google Calendar. More details about FullCalendar can be found here.

jQuery Week Calendar Plugin - A Google Calendar Like Week Calendar

The jQuery Week Calendar features:

a weekly grid for calendar events.
calendar events can be supplied as an array or a function returning JSON.
calendar events can be dragged, dropped and resized.
configurable timeslots
readonly calendars
custom date formatting
direct modification of individual events (create, update, delete...)

Dependencies:

jQuery 1.3.2
jQuery UI 1.7.x for drag, drop, resize

The plugin is compatible with Firefox 3.x, Safari 3.1+, Internet Explorer 7+ and Google Chrome.

The look and feel of the plugin is simple but easily editable by adding stylesheet that overrides colors.

Usage, implementation details and demos can be found here. I highly recommend checking out the FullCalendar plugin for monthly calendar view.

Powerful ASP.NET CMS Solution: Kentico CMS

blogging developer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:45:00 +0300

Kentico CMS is a powerful, flexible and complete content management system which provides a complete set of features with an affordable price.

Kentico CMS – built on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform - comes with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor for creating/editing the content for building web sites, blogs, community sites, intranets and online stores. It has various modules that make building any type of website and manage its content possible. It comes with an API that allows you to script operations such as creating a new document, user, or editing an existing document. The API is great for integrations with any 3rd party software.

Kentico CMS WYSIWYG Editor

Kentico CMS lets you create and maintain articles, newsletters, forums, blogs, polls, news, wikis, product listings, FAQs, and knowledge-base articles. It also comes with a module for implementing e-commerce functionality into your website with support for search-engine optimization (SEO). In addition, Kentico generates SEO-friendly URLs, has full-text search support, a powerful role-based security system. Also, it supports multiple languages including Chinese and languages written from right-to-left such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Kentico CMS promises to fix any bug within 7 days, and in addition they plant a new tree with the name of the bug reporter. You can find more details here.

Kentico CMS for ASP.NET is available in four editions: Free, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition and Social Networking Edition. The core features are the same for all these editions, but some advanced features are not available in the Free and Professional editions. The free edition have no time limitation and can be used for commercial purposes without aqny extra cost. It can be downloaded from here.

Kentico CMS is available in four editions

Besides TRIAL and FREE editions, the Virtual Lab service allows users to test Kentico CMS on-line for 7 days, without the need of installing anything on users’ local PC. To sum up, Kentico CMS is a powerful, flexible and reliable content management system, used by more than 4000 web sites in 83 countries and the clients include Microsoft, Brussels Airlines, Vodafone, Audi, Mazda, Subaru, Samsung, Gibson, Bayer, ESPN, Guinness, DKNY, Abbott Labs, Medibank Private (Australia), Ireland .ie and others.

Creating an iCal like Calendar with jQuery

blogging developer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0300

I wrote a blog post about FullCalendar recently. (FullCalendar: jQuery Event Calendar with Drag'n Drop, Ajax Fething and Google Calendar Integration). I have just come a cross with an astonishing calendar that looks like iPhone's calendar application: iCal.

iCal style calendar with jQuery

This calendar is built with CSS and jQuery. It also features a lightweight Coda-like effect for event descriptions. You can find more details about the calendar here.

FullCalendar: jQuery Event Calendar with Drag'n Drop, Ajax Fetching and Google Calendar Integration

blogging developer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:37:00 +0300

jQuery is a fast and concise Javascript Library that simplifies document traversing, event handling, animating and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides full-sized, drag and drop capable calendar. It utilizes Ajax to fetch events on the fly. It is easily configurable to use custom feed format and also has an extension for Google Calendar. The calendar is highly customizable and has support for user event triggering for window resize, loading, day click, event click, event drop, etc.

FullCalendar - jQuery Calendar Plugin with Drag'n Drop and Ajax Capabilities

FullCalendar comes with the following available views:

month view
week view
day view
agenda week view
agenda day view

Crop Images with jCrop: Cross-Browser jQuery Pluging for Image Cropping

blogging developer — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:23:00 +0300

jQuery Plugin, jCrop provides an easy and quick way to add image cropping functionality to your web applications. jCrop combines ease of use of a plug-in and cross browser and cross platform DHTML cropping engine.

jCrop: jQuery Image Cropping Plugin

jCrop Features:

Attaches any image in the HTML
Supports aspect ratio locking
Supports min. and max. sizes
Supports callback events
Supports CSS styling

As mentioned earlier, jCrop is cross-platform and compatible with Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.5+, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6+.

How To Create Strong Passwords – Tips on increasing your online security

blogging developer — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:44:00 +0300

Creating strong passwords is key to your online security. Since the computers trying to hack passwords are getting more powerful everyday, passwords you are using could be the weakest link you are using.

Password cracking tools use one of the following approaches:

Guessing – using personal information (ex: using date of birth, phone number as password)
Dictionary Attacks – using single words found in dictionaries as password
Bruce Force Attack – trying every possible password

A brute force attack will always be successful if there is no limit to the number of attempts. In order to delay a brute force attack, a strong password should be chosen.

Guide to Strong Passwords:

A strong password should:

Contain 8 or more characters
Combine letters, numbers and symbols
Be easy to remember, but should not contain any easy to guess personal information

You should:

avoid sequences (ex: abcdef) or repeated characters (ex: 55555)
avoid look-a-like substitutions of numbers or symbols (ex:p@ssword)
not use your login name as password
avoid using the same password for all accounts

Links for 2009-09-11 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Image Preloading Deeply - CSS/Javascript/jQuery
Browsers load images after an HTTP request is sent for them either by <img> tag or through a javascript call. If you have a javascript function that changes an image on mouseover, you have to wait while the image is retrieved from the server. This would be disturbing when users have a slow internet connection or when the images being retrieved are very large. Although most of the browsers store images in the local cache so that subsequent calls to them are responded immediately, there is still a delay in the first time the images are needed.
Image Preloading: Javascript or CSS – Comparing the techniques
For better display and visitor interaction, image preloading must be implemented in some cases. Previously we focused on two techniques to achieve image preloading in the following posts:

Image Preloading with Javascript
Preloading Images Using CSS

Today, I would like to compare these two methods to understand the safest and easiest method for preloading images:
jQuery Colorize - Plugin for Alternating Table Row Color/Column Color
When displaying tables in web pages, alternating the background color of each row can increase readability. The jQuery plugin Colorize helps us to alternate table rows and columns, add highlight effect on mouse over and colorize a row/column on mouse click.

Links for 2007-10-17 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Visual Studio Tip: Stop Loosing the Clipboard Data Accidentally
I frequently type Ctrl+C instead of Ctrl+V on a blank line and loose the data on the clipboard by copying a blank line.

Today, I discovered a VS option to disable cut and copy commands on blank lines when there is no selection.

You may find the opti

Links for 2007-09-20 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

IZWebFileManager - Advanced ASP.NET 2.0 Online File Manager Server Control
IZWebFileManager is a web based file manager server control for Microsoft IIS web servers, written for ASP.NET 2.0. It is compatible with most-used browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape.

Its features include: copying, moving, renaming,

Links for 2007-09-17 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Convert, Parse and TryParse Methods - Comparing String to Numerical Conversion Methods
.Net provides several different ways to extract integers from strings. In this article, I will present the differences between Parse, TryParse and ConvertTo.

Links for 2007-09-12 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Using JavaScript with ASP.NET
ASP.NET provides a powerful server-based programming model with its postback architecture that allows performing all the work on the server while ensuring security and compatibility. The most significant weakness of postback architecture is its overhead.
Cross-Browser JavaScript Events - Commonly Supported Events that are Safe to Use
The combination of JavaScript and HTML is called as DHTML (Dynamic HTML). Since not all browsers support the same level of DHTML, the events you can use and the way events work vary from browser to browser.

The following table contains the JavaScript
Limiting the File Upload Size in ASP.NET
By default, the maximum size of a file to be uploaded to a server using the ASP.NET FileUpload control is 4MB. You cannot upload anything that is larger than this limit. To change this size limit, you have to make some changes in the application's web.con

Links for 2007-09-10 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

7 Easy-to-Apply Tips to Improve Your Web Site Performance
lot of articles have been written on website performance optimization lately but I want to share my hands-on-experience and important articles on the subject.

There are two types of performance:

* Server Performance
* Perceived Performance
How To: Minimize HTTP Requests – The Most Important Guideline for Improving Web Site Performance
n my previous article 7 Easy-to-Apply Tips to Improve Your Web Site Performance, I described methods to achieve better client-side performance. The conclusion of the article was: “The most important and effective way to improve web site performance is

Links for 2007-09-08 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Absolutely Pluggable Application-Wide Error Logging Facility for ASP.NET Web Applications - ELMAH
After taking a web application online, you need to track exceptions and errors effectively in order to debug problems. ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) is an application wide error logging facility which is completely pluggable therefore it can