Phil Parsons

Adaptor, an extensible jQuery content slider

Phil — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 14:52:07 +0000

This jQuery plugin is a free and lightweight content slider for creating cool 3D (and 2D) slideshows for featured content on your website. In older browsers that do not support CSS3 with 3D transitions the plugin detects them and degrades gracefully to a simple transition maintaining the rich user experience for everyone. The plugin is powered by jQuery and CSS and is designed to be easy to add to an existing web page with the minimal effort on the designer …

CORS with Ajax (Cross origin resource sharing)

Phil — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 08:12:32 +0000

Cross origin resource sharing (CORS) allows resources from a web server to be accessed from a web page on another domain. The XMLHttpRequest level 2 specification added support for making cross domain requests but it should be noted that this specification is still a working draft. Traditionally I have always made cross domain requests from sites in a two stage process: 1) make a request to the server hosting the local domain for some data which then 2) makes the …

From other languages to Ruby

Phil — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:11:08 +0000

I recently began reading Seven languages in seven weeks where top of the bill was a chapter on Ruby. I hadn’t been avoiding Ruby up to now I just never saw any need to put it as a priority on my “things to do list.” I have been into Ruby source code before but only to do some tweaking with, for instance, my Sass setup. I’ll admit it right here, right now that all those strange looking :symbols and funny …

Offline files with HTML 5

Phil — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:15:43 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with the FileSystem API in Chrome over the last couple of weeks and thought I’d share my musings with a little demo of a file syncing system that I am thinking of using in an application where the user can download a copy of the file, work on it offline and then sync it when connected again. In this post I just want to show the pull side of the sync where the file is downloaded and …

XMLHttpRequest Level 2 Ajax library, xhr2-lib

Phil — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:12:02 +0000

So a while ago a messed about with the File API and FormData with the XMLHttpRequest Level 2 spec which enables the transfer of binary data and tracking of the upload progress through the XMLHttpRequestUpload object – awesome. I was blown away when I first started messing about with this stuff and support for it now seems to be a little more wide spread, nothing in IE or Opera as of yet but you know life goes on. What I …

jQuery Ajax navigation plugin – jNavigate

Phil — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:37:51 +0000

jNavigate is a powerful jQuery plugin that enables you to build single page sites using dynamic content areas powered by Ajax technologies simply and quickly. Turn your website’s hyperlinks into triggers that load page content dynamically reducing the load on your web server while enhancing your users browsing experience. Visit the official siteSource code on Github I posted jNavigate as a jQuery plugin a while back and it received a small amount of attention but soon became evident that I …

Increment operator issue with ColdFusion 8 arrays

Phil — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:01:28 +0000

I spent a good 30 mins debugging a module in one of our products that has been running fine in CF8 for a while but crashed when run on CF9 recently. The problem turned out to be a bug in my code but it also unveiled this freaky bug with CF8. It turns out that if you try to increment the value of a variable used as an array index when assigning a structure or array to that index using …

PONG Turbo – My first stab at game programming

Phil — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:53:05 +0000

First there was Space Invaders... then there was Pacman... then there was PONG... Now I bring to you, PONG Turbo

jRegex – A visual Regular Expressions Tool

Phil — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:10:37 +0000

To celebrate (inter)national Regular Expressions day 2011 I have decided to polish up and share one of my dev tools with the rest of the world. jRegex is born.

Getting capture groups from regex matches in ColdFusion

Phil — Mon, 16 May 2011 22:17:23 +0000

Well, actually, you can’t. If you want to reference capture groups from a match you need to use the regex package from Java. From what I know ColdFusion uses the now redundant Regex engine from Jakarta which also doesn’t support back references. I, myself, have completely given up on the built in support for regular expressions for anything that isn’t incredibly basic and now reach for Java every time. Pattern Matcher The code snippet below runs a fairly simple match …