The third annual ‘animal in a festive hat’ image

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a bit different this year since the squirrel in a santa hat I did last year keeps getting linked to by people on myspace, which is highly annoying. I thought a little branding might stop that this time around.

More Geeky stuff, sorry folks! I’ll do some Kai related stuff soon

After getting stuck in to AJAX, I summised (as others probably have done) that using it to submit a form and give feedback would make the whole process of completing forms online alot more ‘friendly’. Its actually not hard to do, although the example I’m going to show you is no where near polished since its really just a proof of concept.

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I know some people reading will be aware of ‘AJAX’ and ‘web 2.0′ while others will be utterly disinterested - If you’re not a nerdy geek type like me I’d stop reading now since what follows will probably send you to sleep

I won’t enter into discussions about the use of the terms AJAX and web 2.0, personally I don’t like them but they’re recognisable terms so for the sake of easy reference I’m using them. AJAX is something I’ve wanted to learn for a while but I’ve never really had need to, not having had any projects which might make proper use of it, until last week.

I needed to make a event calendar for the front page of the site I look after at work. It needed to fit in a small space but offer as much information about up coming events as possible. My solution involved a mini calendar with event dates highlighted and clickable to display the relevant event information. Without using AJAX methods getting it working would have been a lot harder and much less user friendly. Its not live yet, once it is I’ll post a link and show off.

During my ‘learning’ phase I found a fair few useful sites/posts/code snippets which I thought I’d share for those who know what I’m on about.

Activity Indicator : At times you’ll need to let the user know that ’something’ is happening in the background, like when there’s a delay in fetching the data. Ian Selby came up with this superb use of ‘Ajax.responders’ to do just that.
gen-x-design.com

Activity Indicator Animated .gif Generator : To go with the above, loads of options and massive time saving! (nice looking site too)
ajaxload.info

script.aculo.us : The AJAX toolkit of choice. I spent a good day coding my own HTTPrequest functions only to find that script.aculo.us includes exaclty what I’d done and then some… and its easier to use.
script.aculo.us

Ajaxian : Great source of news and tips about AJAX methods and projects
Ajaxian.com

Photoshop Lab : Some great Photoshop tutorials demonstrating how to recreate some of the effects that are currently en vogue with a lot of sites (’How to do web 2.0 design’ for want of a better way of putting it)
Photoshoplab.com