jQuery HowTo's Launched
Fri, 12/21/2007 - 01:09 — sgrover
And away we go!
I just posted the notice about this site to the jQuery Mailing List. I'm a little nervous to see if the community warms up to the site, but I'm intending on continuing regardless.
Let me answer a few questions:
- Why? - There was a recent discussion on the mailing list about how the jQuery documentation sometimes lags behind the official release, and that some people have a difficult time learning from the reference style of the docs. I had suggested that maybe we needed a How-To type of documentation in addition to the reference, and even went as far as to create an account on the wiki to see about adding this. Well, I don't know the style/syntax of the wiki system in use and knew I was looking at some time to learn it properly. Rather than setting aside the idea while I learned a new system, I decided to start on my own. I started writing a simple web page, but quickly realized that I would need a more manageable way to grow and maintain the list. I also realized that this type of thing should not just be ME doing the work. Rather I felt the community at large would be better at authoring and maintaining the HowTo's. So I built a Drupal site, put it up on my domain under the "jquery" sub-domain, and started typing. And here we are today.
- Feeds? - there are some excellent blogs out in the wild that cover many different topics related to jQuery. Not to mention the mailing list itself. I wanted to capture this information, yet still give credit where it's due. RSS feeds are an excellent solution for this. At the moment I have two feeds in there - the mailing list, and "Learning jQuery". I've learned tons from both these resources. Let me know of any other blogs/sites that should be in that list.
- Future plans? - I'd like to see the site grow popular enough that it becomes an essential learning tool for jQuery. At which time it probably should be merged into the official jQuery site. Until then, I'd rather not impact them too much - they already have enough on their plates in bringing us jQuery itself and everything that goes along with that. I would also like to see the site expand to included anecdotes of how people are using jQuery, or how jQuery helped solve a particular issue with their applications. I'm very open to ideas on how to improve the site, and am willing to grant site administration access to those who have proven themselves with their contributions. In short, I'm just the current admin - I very much want to see others come along.
So while folks begin checking out the site, and hopefully contributing, I'll continue posting the HowTo's I think will help newer users. And some blog posts on some interface challenges I've overcome with jQuery.
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Need complete working code with "How-To's"
One thing I'd really like to see is a complete working example of whatever jQuery concept is being explored.
Included should be all HTML and jQuery, with instructions on how to include the external references to the jQuery or CSS file which might be needed for an example to work.
A copy and paste method would work best, especially in the beginner section. Simply copy all the presented code into a new HTML page (an exception to this would have to be the externally referenced jQuery core, plug-ins, and CSS.)
But no knowledge should always be assumed. It's best to talk "under" someone's level of ability rather that "above" it.
An advanced user can always skip over content which they understand, but a beginner can never include content which they don't understand is needed.
Rick
I like the idea, but feel
I like the idea, but feel the time commitment might be a little much to ask of volunteer authors. Perhaps we put this into the guidelines - especially for the more complex HowTo's? I mean working up fully functional code to demonstrate $("#myobject").hide() seems overkill to me. But for something like $.ajax({ . . . }) this makes perfect sense.
Also, If this sort of discussion is going to come up often, perhaps we'll need forums? (just need to enable the module and set up a link...)
Added to the guidelines
I've added an entry to the HowTo guidelines for this. As the site evolves we'll revisit this and other ideas.