Around in Europe

May 30th, 2009

Wanted to write a quick post while overseas. Just wanted to say that sorry for the delay in posts recently. I have been away in Europe the past couple of weeks. I started in England and then headed for the Greek islands. Its a blast here, a great way to end the year and start the summer. I have been taking a bunch of photos and will be sure to upload them to flickr and post up the link. Wish I brought my laptop with me to upload and see what I got for shots so far.

I will be back on the 4th and back to reality, catching up on the site work that I have in store for me, along with the many blog posts I have as drafts right now. I have been slacking on that. Also, working on finishing the new layout for my site. Giant to do list, but I hope I can get it all done and get caught up. Cheers

Time for another iGoogle theme?

May 5th, 2009

So i came across my old iGoogle theme I made in the fall and was thinking of making another one. Shockingly, they’re extremely easy to create. Its a large XML document.  I have been working on a new layout for my site. I was thinking of another landscape but similar to the landscape, but different style.
Summer Landscape - iGoogle Theme

I am trying to free my schedule from client work to start working on the new layout, stil need to work on the move right text, bottom posts boxes, colors, and what the single page is going to look like, all in all its a work in progress. Almost done with a jQuery tutorial on submitting a  comment form and having the results loaded using jQuery/Ajax. The comments on the page are loading using PHP, JSON, and jQuery, very slick. Expect that very soon.

New Layout and Trip

May 4th, 2009

Its been a very long time! I have been extremely busy with the end of the school year with finals as well as client work up to my eye balls. I have been working on a new layout for ryancoughlin.com and you can check a quick preview here: http://ryancoughlin.com/nightday/

If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free. Still needs alot of work. My goal is to get this up fairly soon. The site needs a face lift, looking a bit dull.

Along with the new layout, I have some blog posts that I have been working on, so keep your RSS feeders ready. If not, head over to the subsribe box and grab my Feedburner URL.

I am going to be headed off to Europe on May 13, starting in England, then headed to Greece to end my trip. Im going to do my best to keep at blog posts as well as keeping my flickr updated. Expect lots of pictures. I’ll do my best to keep it updated.

Stay tuned for updates.

5 Services For Short, Tiny, Small, and Compact URL’s

April 3rd, 2009

Everyone is using Twitter as a means to promote their blog posts or articles. Since Twiter only limits each tweet to 140 characters, which doesn’t leave you alot to say you have a new blog post and the title, along with the URL for users to check it out. Thanks to the expansion of Twitter, more and more tiny URL services have been released. Below is a collection of 8 that i have found and used in the past.

Some are the more well know such as Ping.fm and TinyURL, but I found a couple others that do the job just fine. Check out the list below and post if you have any others you use!

TinyURL
Example URL: http://tinyurl.com/c35n8e – 28 characters
Organic URL:
http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 27 characters

This is by far one of the mostly used and original tiny URL services out there. Generates a fairly small URL. This service makes it great for posting long URLs on twitter or any other social media service. Shows you the original and the number of characters, which is a nice added bonus. Also allows you to create your own tiny URLtinyurl alias instead of having the service generate one for you.

Tinyarro
Example URL:
http://✩.ws/ꉚ – 12 characters
Actual URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 28 characters

tinyarro

This is a fairly new tiny URL service out there, but what makes this one differen than the others, is that is uses symbols instead of random characters for instance, it uses arrows and stars. There is a dropdown to the left of the input field for your URL where you can choose what symbol you would like to use for your URL.  Once you create the URL, it has a shortened version and then a Twitter preferred version as well. Along with those two, it has a TinyURL version and the original. These are one of the smallest URL’s I have seen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Create a jQuery Accordion – remain open after page load

March 30th, 2009

I am currently working on this site for a client: http://www.hornedpout.com/ – a very basic portfolio website for a designer/writer. I didn’t want to use the bulky code of the jQuery UI so I decided to use the smaller version, below:

$(".menu-header").click(function() {
        $(this).next().toggle('slow');
        return false;
}).next().hide();

The HTML would look something similar to:





That code will use jQuery’s toggle() function. When the user clicks the h2 tag it will close all elements until the next
tag. This snippet is very handy for creating a quick accordion effect, this can also be found on the jQuery’s documentation

Now we have the guts sorted out, but the problem is if you travel to another page within that category, it will close. I’m sure you want to check out the code that is going to do this.

Keep that open!

var matches;
     if( matches = (new String(document.location)).match(/?c=w+/) ) {
        $("a[href=" + matches[0] + "]").parents("ul").toggle();
     }

The code above is fairly straight forward. The first line checks to see if we already have a sub-menu open. It evaluates by looking at the current pages URL “?c=page_here”.

The latter part of the code. Now that we grabbed the current URL of the sub-menu, we can use this to find the parent menu which is the
ul and display it:

$("a[href=" + matches[0] + "]").parents("ul").toggle();

The quick fix to keep your accordion block open while traveling to different URLS. To achieve the URLS of “?c=page”. I am using this PHP code below save it as index.php, also create a header.php and a footer.php.

Give it a shot, hope that this can work for you, it did wonders for my project. Also thanks to Kent, for helping me. If it did work post some examples!