While designing this blog, I decided that I wanted to use tabs to display certain pages. I needed a JQuery Plugin that worked similarly to jTabber except that I wanted the tabs to display underneath the content. In addition, I wanted the relevant content to slide down (animated) when the tab was clicked. I read somewhere that I could use jTabber to accomplish this, but I thought that it would be easier if I just created the plugin myself. So I created the JQuery Plugin, imUpsideDownTabber (I couldn’t think of a better name). Click on the menu items at the top of this page (about, links, recent) to see the plugin in action.

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Although I had created a few code snippets using Scriptaculous/Prototype, Dojo Toolkit was the first Javascript Framework that I really learned. I had read about (and downloaded) it quite a few years before I actually used it. I purchased a couple of books (Mastering Dojo: JavaScript and Ajax Tools for Great Web Experiences (Pragmatic Programmers) and Dojo: The Definitive Guide) to help me get started. I was working on a project where web pages would be dynamically created. I have to admit, I struggled. Although Dojo is a  “Javascript” Framework, learning it was like learning a new language – before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. While I was able to learn the basics from reading the books and looking at the examples on Dojo’s website, in many cases, I just could not find the documentation to do what I wanted to do (or how I wanted to do it). So I guessed. And guessed again. And continually guessed until, “Eureka!”. No that didn’t work either…

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After many years of creating Flash-enabled websites (and writing a lot of ActionScript), I decided to explore the use of Ajax. I had grown so accustom to developing websites where page refreshes weren’t required that I rarely created websites using HTML only. From everything that I read prior creating website using Ajax, I thought that it had the promise to replace Flash. My primary reason for exploring the use of Ajax to create websites was because, as I learned more about marketing a website (and how most search engines don’t/can’t index Flash-only sites), I decided that it was better to appear in a search engine’s listing than to have cool navigation (and animation!).

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