Skull Jackpot

Various thoughts of minimal interest to others

Quick and dirty (but useful) jQuery accordion pattern

March 30, 2009

It’s fairly common to want to have multiple panels on a page, only one of which should be visible at any given moment. There are too many jQuery accordion examples to count. I recently knocked together a handy general case, which includes a novel piece of functionality. What makes this one different? You can specify an arbitrary panel to be expanded upon page load, without any server-side code.

Inline Info

November 24, 2008

Making forms as usable and compact as possible is a fairly common goal in web design. Screen real estate is often at a premium, and finding ways to orient and provide information to users which doesn’t require additional space can be a great asset.

I decided to write a jQuery plugin to help fill this need.

Click to Clipboard

October 6, 2008

Our team uses Skitch a lot. It’s a pretty invaluable tool for communicating visual information – you can easily annotate screenshots or comps. There’s great communicative value in being able to point at something, and as a remote employee in my past two jobs, I can’t imagine ever collaborating on web work without it.

Skitch does a lot of things well, but one bit of polish which always pops out at new users is the “Click to Clipboard” functionality. Skitch provides lots of ways for you to share your images, and when you click in the appropriate field, the site copies all the data to your computer’s clipboard, and presents a nice confirmation that you’re ready to paste that elsewhere.