One thing which I usually find quite annoying is using input boxes in forms for user entered dates. Having the user manually enter date, day, month, year seems so 1997 to me. However in the interest of time, this is what most programmers slap into the web applications simply because it’s easier to produce and easier to maintain.

Well here’s a handful of solutions that can solve that problem for you. Create user friendly and attractive date entries with these Date Pickers. Some are just normal entries used for basic forms, while others have more database integration.

Some use the jQuery library. Others use mootools or the Yahoo! UI. No matter what your needs, you’ll find something here that you can use.

Source: Online Calendars and Date Pickers [Smashing Magazine]

Popularity: 40%

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Introduction

In the spirit of rapid web development, I’ve stumbled upon jQuery. Here’s a testimonial from a jQuery user:

You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind.”

In my experience it’s been more like five (5) lines of jQuery.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

I’ve found jQuery great for the following reasons:

• Simple Ajax in a breeze
• Search for elements in the DOM is made easy
• The helper function [ $() ] is a pleasure to use
• Most importantly: it handles cross browser compatibility.

Here We Go - Tutorials Galore

Your first step will be to Download jQuery 1.2.1 and include it in the head of your web page. After this you need to start reading some tutorials. Don’t worry, it’s going to take 15 minutes tops for you to start writing usable code:

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OK, now this is really cool. If you ask me it’s a beautiful use of AJAX.

1. Pick a category
2. Search
3. Click on an item and get a pop up with details
4. Click and Drag items to the shopping cart on the right

Yep, that’s it. The name fits great. There is absolutely none of the clutter that you get from Amazon’s main website.

This site deserves a lot more than what it’s getting right now.

Source: Search Amazon In Style [uncluttr]

Popularity: 6%

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Ever wanted to find out what your users have been up to before they came to your site? Yep, you now have that power. I can see that little twinkle in your eyes now. You’re thinking that this is just insane and you can only imagine the power that now lies at your fingertips. Well, it’s not that easy.

How It Works

First of all, stop freaking out. We’re not exactly stealing your browser’s history. We’re doing a bit of guessing. It can only be run against a defined list of sites. This means that you can only check whether someone has visited a site, say Disney.com, but you can’t ask their browser for a list of the sites they’ve visited. That information is still kept confidential by the browser.

What we do is use some JavaScript to check the color of the links on a page. Ahhh, I see the lil’ light bulb going on over your head right now. Yep folks, that’s all. Nothing fancy. So rest at ease, your browser history is safe for the most part.

SpyJax: Go check it out, and figure out how to stop it, or at least limit the way people use it on you.

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Now I’ve never really been a Photoshop guy. I just don’t have an eye for that stuff, even if it may be very basic. What’s my solution? My Cool Button. This service allows you to created, not to bad if I do say so myself, Web 2.0 buttons on the fly.

A lil’ PHP and GD2 sure does go a long way these days.

Popularity: 6%

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Weebly has finally launched, well again. What is Weebly? It’s online website creation using the latest and greatest of web 2.0. It’s a WYSIWYG editor, but so much more. You can choose to host you website at Weebly, where you will get a sub-domain, or you can host at your own domain. For the latter option you will need to change the CNAME records of your domain name so that they point to whaterver.weebly.com.

Everything is done in a drag and drop interface: pictures, text, headings, even page titles. It reminds me of Google’s website creator just a bit.

One interesting thing that I’ve seen is the way you can preview different designs or themes. As soon as you hover over the theme the entire page changes to show you how it would look.

Check out Weebly if you’re not into all this nitty gritty web stuff.

Popularity: 6%

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Why We Might Need (Want) JavaScript Links

Recently I stumbled upon a site that I haven’t been to for a while: CSOWeb.org. The design is nice and clean: a header image, with some gradients and colors that work together. But wait, where are all the links? 95% of the links on the sites are http://csoweb.org/#. What the hell? Everything is done behind the scenes in JavaScript in OnClick() scripts.

Sometime later I read a post on the Future of the Web about JavaScript only links. The first comment on the page is usually everyone’ argument for these links.”But…but…what about GMail, and Google Web Toolkit?!?!?”. Good argument, I guess. Everyone loves Google and everyone tries to emulate them. There’s no problem in that as long as we understand what’s going on. Magic word: AJAX. AJAX makes heavy use of JavaScript for obvious reasons. If we’re populating a page from a database using AJAX, then JavaScript is the only option. This leads us into the discussion of appropriate uses of Ajax. Don’t take me back there man.

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This may be one of the most difficult things to consider when starting up with AJAX. There are a lot of AJAX Tutorials out there that give you good background information. And it’s good to know what’s going on behind the scenes, it really is, but let’s face it if you’re going create anything worthwhile with AJAX, it makes no scene to do it from scratch. As a developer, I’m a big fan of frameworks. If you think it about it enough, everything is a framework for something. I suppose that if you have a couple hours (days depending on your skill level) you could write a very functional console application that emulates a basic calculator in sssembly code. Or, you could fire notepad, write a quick C++ application in about 5 minutes and compile and you’re fine.

In the same respect, you could use C++ and create a very graphical Windows application or you could use C# and the .NET Framework and fire one out in minutes. Why should web development be any different? Frameworks are there for a reason. A team usually develops a Framework over a long period. They get all the kinks out and they make it available for you guys to use. If a bug is found, they do a fix and put out a new version. You simply replace the files that you use.

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