The time is finally here

November 1st, 2009 by Brian | 2 Comments »

After several months of not updating, and not having the desire to write new content, I have decided to scrap d’bug. I will likely be leaving the content up through to the new year, but shortly thereafter I will be pulling everything. I appreciate all the comments and support I’ve received, and I’m sure I’ll cross paths with a few of you in the near future — especially those in the jQuery community who have been a great resource.

Posted in: Announcements

Aren’t Web frameworks supposed to make programming easier?

July 30th, 2009 by Brian | 4 Comments »

About a month ago I started reading up on Spring Source, and I decided to explore the framework at a high level through the Spring MVC step by step tutorials. MVC is by far the most popular Web software architecture pattern, and although conceptually consistent in theory, implementations vary significantly from language to language. Understanding the spirit of the pattern is helpful, but the reality is that every MVC framework, including Spring MVC, takes a significant investment of time to learn because of the differences. I often find myself wondering, aren’t Web frameworks supposed to make programming easier? Read More…

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Posted in: Web Development

Parse JSON with jQuery and JavaScript redux using the Flickr Services API

July 21st, 2009 by Brian | 3 Comments »

Awhile back I posted a tutorial on parsing (traversing) JSON with jQuery that received quite a bit of traffic, and continues to garner a good deal of traffic today. I took a step back to review what I had written, and realized that although the code is sound, the tutorial comes across as rather abstract. I decided to write another post detailing some of the finer points of jQuery and JSON using the Flickr API. Read More…

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Posted in: JavaScript

d’bug redesigns again… keeping it simple and clean

July 19th, 2009 by Brian | 2 Comments »

I’ve wanted to upgrade Wordpress for awhile now, so once again I’ve decided to redesign d’bug. This time around I’m going with something simple and clean… some might say boring. I’m still cleaning up older posts, especially the code samples. I integrated Syntax Highlighter, and that means having to tweak several archived articles to fit the new build. It makes sense that this would be the new format as I focus more on technical writing — getting away from the broad range of distractions I have posted previously. I hope you like it.

Posted in: Announcements

Using CSS specificity to better organize your JavaScript

June 17th, 2009 by Brian | 7 Comments »

I’m in a constant quest to better organize my JavaScript, and lately I’ve started to realize I’m going about it all wrong. I typically design my namespace as a series of functional components that can be called on each page. However, I’m realizing it is much easier to create a namespace that has a direct correlation to the pages themselves. Depending upon the page, I can then change a function’s output accordingly. Read More…

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Posted in: Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, Web Development

Sending an XML document object to PHP with jQuery

June 10th, 2009 by Brian | 12 Comments »

The most common approach to passing data to PHP with jQuery’s Ajax implementation is to post query string parameters as key/value pairs. These values are read by your application, and then a response is typically constructed by the server-side, informing the client-side of the results. However, there is another approach that is often overlooked, and that is passing a full-blown XML document object to the server. Read More…

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Posted in: JavaScript, PHP, Web Development

Grand River Interactive is hiring an interface engineer in Ann Arbor, MI

May 10th, 2009 by Brian | Comments Off

My employer is looking to hire a full time interface engineer to work in our Ann Arbor, MI, office. You will report directly to me, and will have the opportunity to be a part of a really great, tight-knit team. We work hard in a relaxed (jeans and t-shirt) environment, and try to manage projects responsibly so that the job does not require constant overtime. Read More…

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Posted in: Announcements