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