Tom Walters

Category: Tips & Tricks

  • Hide an element with jQuery whilst scrolling

    Note: This article has been marked for a quality review and will soon be updated. Today I came across an interesting problem that no amount of Google searches could solve. So I had to knuckle down and come up with a solution – and surprisingly it was much more simple that it had first appeared.…

  • 10 Best Practises for jQuery Beginners

    Note: This article has been marked for a quality review and will soon be updated. jQuery is the one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks available; it enables developers to write code that is easy to understand but that also allows really powerful functionality. There are a boat-load of tutorials out there on jQuery, and…

  • Force JS replace to work on all occurrences of needle

    When manipulating strings in JavaScript a useful method to know about is the replace() method. It take 2 parameters – the needle and the haystack. So if you wanted to replace ‘cat’ with ‘dog’ it might look something like this: var myString = “The cat jumped over the fence”; var myNewString = myString.replace(“cat”,”dog”); document.write(myNewString); Great it worked.…

  • Adding subtle user feedback

    We all hate waiting for websites to load right? It’s annoying to watch images download and wait for Twitter streams to render isn’t it? Well it’s a fact that 99% of websites have this issue – that is, that load time is about 1 or 2 seconds. Now for companies like Google it isn’t an…

  • Adding Vignettes to Images with CSS

    Vignettes are something we’ve been able to add to images in Photoshop for many years – it describes the technique of reducing clarity towards the edges of images by reducing things like saturation and brightness, and can often give an image a different quality. It was for that reason that I decided I wanted to…

  • QuickTip: Create a dotted/dashed line in Photoshop

    More and more often nowadays I am finding the need to create dotted or dashed lines in my Photoshop mockups, but what is a ten second job in CSS, could turn out to be a ten minute job in Photoshop if you don’t know how to do so easily. Before I came across the trick…

  • Using absolute and relative positioning

    Now to many people this might be a really simple concept, that is the concept of using absolute and relative positioning; but I remember when I started web design I wasn’t really sure what either meant. So this article is aimed at explaining why you might want to use the two properties in conjunction with…

  • Playing with the New Canvas Element

    Full adoption of HTML5 is just round the corner, and with more and more browser-vendors making HTML5 top-priority these days, it’s time, I think, we should take a look at some of the cool things we can do with the new <canvas> element. So what is it? Well although I don’t profess to be an…

  • Element Organization

    So what do I mean when I say element organisation? Well put simply I’m referring to the way in which we group HTML elements in terms of either tables, divs or HTML5. Now to be honest I believe that tables these days are somewhat obsolete and I wouldn’t even bother teaching it to new web…

  • Replacing the […] in WordPress

    Some of you might be wondering what I mean by the […], well I am of course referring to the symbol generated by WordPress upon calling the function the_excerpt(). Now personally I really dislike the symbol which is generated as it often doesn’t fit with my design, and I always prefer to have an ellipse…