New Application – YUI Compressor Automator

I just wrote a wrapper application for Yahoo’s excellent CSS and JS minifyer YUI Compressor.

YUI Compressor is a command-line tool that allows you to minify one .css or one .js file at a time, reducing the filesize (quite drammatically in some cases) and increasing the performance of your site for first-time visitors (repeat visitors will already have these files in their cache).

My application wraps the YUI Compressor in a visual GUI, shielding you from the command-line scaryness that would otherwise ensue (ok, CLI’s are nice and friendly once you’ve used them a few times, but a lot of non-developer’s shy away from them). To minify files you just select them in Windows Explorer and drag them into the application window. The application then spits the files out into a folder on your desktop.

This means that minifying files is much faster because you don’t have to type anything, and it also means that you can minify whole batches of files at once

I wrote the application using VB.NET so at this point it only runs on Windows machines.

Download the application installer. The installer features everything you need including the original YUI Compressor CLI application. If you have not used the CLI version (or other Java-based JAR apps) before you may need to add data to your Windows class path in order to make it work.

For more information, see the Yahoo documentation for YUI Compressor

Posted in YUI | 3 Comments

jQuery Plugin – jMailer

jMailer is a plugin for jQuery I wrote that provides the visitor with a popup email form. It should be attached to a link element and when that link is clicked, the popup appears centered in the viewport.

Within the popup is a form which let’s the visitor enter an email address they want to send the email to, their email adress so that the recipient can reply directly to them, a subject box and a message box.

jMailer Example

The ‘Contact Me’ tab at the top of this site has the plugin attached; click it to see the popup form and send me a message
The To field has been mapped to my own mail address in the back-end so messages will only come to me.

You should also note that the plugin constitues just the front-end. A back-end of your choice (PHP, .NET, etc) can be attached to do the physical sending of mail.

jMailer Features

The current release (1.1) of jMailer has the following features:

• Automatic modality
• Automatic iFrame shim when IE6 is used
• Configurable opening and closing animations
• AJAX sending of form data to the back-end and confirmation message
• Basic error checking for non-completed fields

jMailer Usage

Using the plugin is simple: Download the source file and ensure you have a copy of the jQuery library to hand (min version 1.2.6).

Then just attach the plugin to the link using standard jQuery syntax:

$("#mailerLink").jMailer();

jMailer Configuration

A configuration object can be supplied in the constructor to configure various options:

var config = {
  modal: true || false //defaults to true
  id: "a string" //defaults to "mailer"
  shim: true || false //defaults to false unless IE6 in use
  forceShim: true || false //defaults to false
  defaultClass: "a string" //defaults to "mailer-container"
  additionalClass: "a string" // defaults to null
  suppressTo: true || false //defaults to false
  animation: hide || slideUp || fade //defaults to hide
}

$("#mailerLink").jMailer(config); 

Posted in jQuery | 15 Comments

New Blog

Welcome to my new blog!

I thought it high time that I rolled out a fresh new theme for my site and decided to completely change the look and feel of it while migrating to a new platform for easier updating.

The new theme features several images that were obtained, with gratitude, from NASA. This site, and myself, have nothing to do with NASA and we’re affiliated in no way whatsoever. I just happen to like space, and all Nasa images are in the public domain and therefore free Extra points to anyone that can name the nebulae that are featured.

I’ll be posting links to articles that I write, sites I build and projects I undertake, as well as personal views, thoughts and general observations. jQuery and jQuery UI will feature heavily.

Thanks for visiting, happy reading, and I hope you enjoy the new site

Posted in General | 6 Comments