Code

It didn't take long for my CSS counter experiment to break, and after more than a year I thought it was time for a reboot.

The biggest shortcoming of my flip-counter script is the difficulty in modifying the appearance of the counter; any styling change requires altering 70 different sprite states. The best way to make the counter's appearance easily customizable is to get rid of the images entirely, and that was the goal of this experiment.

When someone makes a comment on my site, I like to see it in the visitor's action list on Clicky. If you're using Disqus with WordPress, here's an easy way to log comments.

My first step when thinking of ways to create scrollable content was a Google search that lead me to a (now dead) post outlining how to use jQueryUI Slider to scroll a div. This solution required altering the jQueryUI source, which I felt was unnecessary, so I came up with a simple solution.

I noticed yesterday that Apple has a new product nav menu that replaced their old horizontal scroller with some new animated candy. I was impressed to see that all transitions and animations are CSS-based. Unfortunately, it will take some time before all major browsers even support this cool new CSS wizardry. Never fear—you can create a similar menu with jQuery that works in every browser, even IE6.

My original post detailing how I recreated Apple's flip-style counter is a popular one, and I get many questions about how to properly implement it. It didn't take long before I saw some shortcomings to the original technique I used, so I thought it was time to revisit the counter and make some improvements.

I rely heavily on regular expressions when processing old data. Like my post about cleaning phone numbers, I'll demonstrate another example of how useful regex can be when dealing with unruly data.

A few months ago, a project bid had me looking at YouTube's JavaScript API for ways to manage a video library through a custom interface. Most of the videos were over 30 minutes, and I thought it would be great if I could provide some analytics on how users were interacting with the videos.

When I saw the 10 billion song counter on Apple's website yesterday, I immediately right-clicked on it to see if it was flash. No big surprise to see that it wasn't, this being Apple, and when I saw it was done using JavaScript I knew how I'd be wasting the next few hours.

I've been in the position of having to take an unnormalized database that had virtually no data validation or standardization in place, and migrating it to a normalized schema. I used regex to help me through the process.