The Selected() Plugin

Part of the code I write requires a sort of radio button or toggle button functionality. The core ability is to be able to set an item as selected (or checked, active, clicked, etc.). I ran into this a lot and found myself writing the same simple code over and over again until I created the selected plugin.

Now i can simply write this with jQuery:

$("a").selected(true);
var isSelected = $("a").selected();

Of course this led to being able to have a group of buttons with only one selected at a time:

$("a.tab").selectedGroup();

I have the plugin up on GitHub with a little more explanation and a demo:
https://github.com/jasonsavage2/jquery.selected

Let me know what you think.

Minimal jQuery.slideshow()

Yesterday, I worked on a barebones jQuery slideshow that would be able to be easily customized for our websites. Why create another slideshow plugin when we have this wonderful plugin: http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/? I don't know, waste some time at work, ha!

I only wanted the basic functionality of a slideshow. It needs to select a group of items and cycle through them at a set speed. There should be public methods like: next(), prev(), gotoSlide(), pause(), play() for manually switching slides. While building this slideshow, I figured that it doesn't actually need to switch the slides, just dispatches "change" event when it's time.

In the end i did break down and add a bit of code to auto generate previous button, next button, and/or a menu if needed, but other than that it is very small and ment to be extended to your needs.

//default settings (w menu)
$(".slideshow").slideshow({
    nav : "menu",
    delay : 700,
    slidesSelector : "ul.slides > li",
    onChange : [function (event, index, $slides, $slideshow)]
});

Now it's up on Git Hub (which I'm a bit of a noob at). you can download it here:
https://github.com/jasonsavage2/jquery.slideshow

Let me know what you think, or if you have any ideas on how it could be better.

Day 1

So I started this blog because it seems like everyone who is in the web development biz has some kind of blog to show what they figure out from day to day while building websites. We'll see how it goes, I'm not that great of a writer...