the source of get()

I’ve recently started creating websites through BluePaperBag.com with my brother, JC Schroder, and his company, Star Com Productions.  He’s incredibly talented and handles the Graphic Design side of things while I stick to the coding and Customer Service that I enjoy more.

A week ago, we released our first website, AikmanMusic, for a very talented local composer, James Aikman.  During development, I’ve learned quite a bit about new DHTML trends on the web.  During the next few posts, I’ll talk about some of the things I found great to have around while writing this site.

1) mootools: A good (and MIT Licensed) JavaScript Library
While I got into DHTML back in “layers” days, I’d been out of it a while. I found that using a library is often useful because it lets you be sure you’re compatible with many browsers at the same time. Additionally, it keeps you from having to re-create the wheel with event-driven animations.  The one I used with this site is mootools. I like it a lot because it’s fairly small, easy to learn, and compatible with lots of browsers. It’s also extremely easy to customize what parts of it you want to distribute based on what you need. At the download site you can choose precisely which parts you need (i.e. if you only need to fade things in and out, but don’t need to be able to drag layers around) and which compression you need. After that, by clicking download, it sends you a customized .js file to go.

This library was used in the site extensively.  First, because I wanted an alternative to flash for the intro page, and secondly because it was helpful for the fade-ins and slides requested by James and used on the music pages.

That’s all for now.  Next Time:  MOOdalbox.

GS

1. Download & Install Putty from:
   http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
2. Start Putty and go to Connection -> SSH -> X11 to check “Enable X11 Forwarding.”
   
3. (optional) Go to SSH and choose “Enable Compression” for enhanced performance over some connections.
   I’d test this both ways and see which one seems faster to you.
   
4. Go to Session and enter your host name
   
5. Right click on window border, type name in Saved Sessions, then clicking Save, then Apply.
   
6. Download and Install newest version of Xming (not xming-mesa – that has an older rendering method) from:
   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156984
   (Leave Putty Window Open; we’ll go back in a second.)
7. (optional) Download and install Xming-fonts (from same location as above)
8. (optional) Set font dpi to 96 by right clicking on the Shortcut in your Start Menu to Xming, then adding “-dpi 96″ to your command line (I do this because I noticed some standalone apps [i.e. qt apps] have tiny fonts otherwise).
   
9. Start Xming (You’ll notice it in your system tray).
10. Return to putty and type a command (i.e. kate or ddd), then press enter.
    You’ll notice that it steals focus from the terminal.
11. Close the App you started and enter “command &” (i.e. kate &) followed by the enter key.
    This will background the process, letting you run multiple X-Windows apps simultaneously.
    

    You’re done! Enjoy X-Windows apps on your Windows Machine!

Hey Everyone.
I hope to make this my tech blog. I needed a place to share, so here it is! Hopefully you find something useful here … and hopefully I keep having useful things to write.

GS