Recently, I was looking into date and time pickers for jQuery. jQuery UI has a great datepicker but I wanted something that provided a slick time input as well. When I did some searching I found quite a few options but two seemed to stick out above the rest. Read more »

I recently saw something terrible happen again. Another website was hacked with a very simple attack. An attack that's been used time and time again. It was a brute force attack trying common usernames and passwords. This is annoying to have to fix, trouble when the server or site is being used for something malicious, and the users feel terrible for being the cause with their weak passwords. There is something we can do about it. We can put password strength testers everywhere someone sets a new password or changes an existing one. Let users know the passwords are weak and what they can do to make them stronger. Read more »

When I was working on a script to preload images with JavaScript one of the decisions I had to make was whether to use document.createElement('img') or an image object to preload the image into. The recommended w3c method is to use document.createElement('img') as it is a consistent way to create elements. This is the method I used. But, I was wondering which performed better. So, I ran some tests and here is what I learned. Read more »

Creating effects on websites using jQuery and other JavaScript has really grown from flashy extras to full on applications in the browser. Part of slick applications is images. They might be part of the content being loaded or something like an icon in an application. But, for those images being added after the page is loaded there can be a time gap while that image is downloaded. To avoid those time delays the images can be preloaded in the background. Lets take a look at how to do that. Read more »

On of the common patterns in front end web development is to detect the browser and enable site features based on the particular browser being used. With so many different broswers and versions being used and constantly being released this can quickly become a pain. Take just the Yahoo Grade A Browsers plus Google Chrome and you are looking at more than ten browser versions being used. Luckily, there is a better way and it lets us support more browsers than we can think of. Instead of detecting browsers we detect features a browser might have. Read more »