Avoid Using Flash: The jQuery Cycle Plugin

My cousin Alexandra ran into an entertainment industry snafu earlier this year when an uncredited appearance on Lost gave the tv show’s internet fans free reigns to guess her name.  Unofficial credits began appearing on the photographer’s flickr photos, then TV Guide and, finally, on Lostpedia entries in English, and Spanish.  When she realized that a search of Alexandra Tobas wielded more content than a search of her correctly spelled name, Alexandra Tabas (with an ‘a’), she called me for help.  We did a bit of troubleshooting on her IMDB page, and on each Lostpedia entry.  I then did a ‘whois’ on her domain name.  She owned her domain name and didn’t have anything up yet!  This is a tidbit for everyone out there – if you do not like your search results, you only have yourself to blame if you do not have a site up under www.yourname.com.

While I do not have time to build her an entire portfolio right now, I went ahead and put up a simple page using the jQuery Cycle Plugin.  This plugin is an excellent way to mimic Flash objects without having to actually use Flash.  I never learned to use Flash seriously because it is a black box to search engines, although I’ve heard this has changed in recent years.  If this is old news, the new headlines are reporting that Flash uses unregulated cookies and is invading our privacy, which means I’m still staying away from it with a ten foot pole.  Many web designers hate Flash on similar principles, if not just for the sole reason that there is this misnomer that your website, brand or image is somehow cool because you use a Flash intro on your site.  Flash is fun to play with, but not necessarily the tool you want to use for heavy lifting.

That being said, jQuery Cycle Plugin is about the easiest thing you can use to add some pizzazz to your site.  In about three easy steps:

1. Reference the jQuery library, and the Cycle Plugin in your header.
2. Create a <div class=”pics”> and list your <img> within that div tag.  Make sure to specify each images height and width, and include an alt value, not just to be xhtml compliant, but because you want to add extra, search-able text, to your site.
3. Set the height and width of your .pics class in your css.  Make sure they are big enough to hold each image.
4. Add the following script to your file:

$(document).ready(function() {
$(‘.pics’).cycle({
fx: ‘fade’
});

The plugin’s demo site is super easy to follow for any beginner, and if you want to get fancier, you can change your transition type in your script. I will definitely be using this plugin for my own portfolio in the future!

View AlexandraTabas.com here!

San Francisco’s Random Taco Crawl Generator

For those of you close to me, you have definitely heard about a small side project I started at the end of May called the Random Taco Crawl Generator.  I dreamed up this great idea of being able to query a website for a random sampling of taquerias in San Francisco while I was at the gym over memorial day weekend.  The night before I had been on a Taco Crawl for my friend Kevin’s birthday.  He had held a few before, but this was my first with him, and with almost 20 other people that joined in for the celebration!

While we were sitting stuffed at our 5th taqueria, one of Kevin’s friends pondered aloud “I wonder if tacocrawl.com is taken.”  Everyone in ear shot with an iPhone started scouring the internet to see if the domain had been secured, and then to see if they, themselves, could secure the domain.  As I watched them scramble, I wondered too, “Why don’t you just call GoDaddy?  They have a horrible UI, but great phone service.” (I really am a true believer).  They ignored me!  I speculated, this time silently, it was because they didn’t want to listen to a girl (because guys know so much more about tech then us females, clearly).

Finally, I decided to grab GoDaddy’s phone number (on my blackberry, mind you) and give them a call.  Sure enough the domain was available, they had my account number and credit card on file, and I had the domain signed, sealed, and delivered within 5 minutes.  Everyone was dumbfounded for two reasons:

1. It didn’t occur to anyone (except for me) that you could secure a domain name by phone.
2. No one thought that any two-word combination was still even available in the domain space.

So while I was at the gym the following day, I was thinking about what I could do with my new domain.  Around that same time I decided I wanted to start getting back into more interactive web-development (pages that do things, not just show information).  For the past few years, my day job has confined me to strictly requirements and design, but no development.  Even with a few of my side projects – including this website, The General History Project, and The Bead Store – I hadn’t really written an if() or while() statement, in a while.

What started as a fun challenge to see who could secure the domain www.TacoCrawl.com fastest, turned into a side project using the Yelp API.  I wrote most of the logic in PHP, but sprinkled some jQuery and XML throughout the site.  The basic idea is that I query Yelp for as many taquerias within a 2 mile radius of the neighborhood selected.  I check to see if the data set returned to me is greater or less than the number of taquerias the user requested.  Ideally, the data set is greater, so I can generate a set of random numbers, and select from the full array of taquerias randomly.  If the data set is less than the number of taquerias the user requested, than I return to the user all the taquerias Yelp returned to me.

All in all, once I got back into the swing of things, I found the Yelp API to be really easy to work with, and the google group to be very helpful. I also started using this handy tool for cross-browser design – check out Browser Shots.

In the process, I got a lot of really great feedback through uservoice and email.  Some people want to see the site extend to other food genres, other cities and mobile browsers.  Other food genres are hard because few delicacies are small and edible repeatedly in crawl fashion the way tacos can be consumed.  For other cities, I checked in my own home town, Philadelphia, and only one neighborhood Yelp lists in its API has enough taquerias to make a taco crawl possible.  Finally, there’s no excuses, mobile browsing capability would be great, and so would a google map mash-up.  The truth is, I want to eat tacos, not program tacos; I need a break!  I want to work on other things!

Andale! Go find you some tacos!

PS:  There’s an easter egg in the program.  I’d like to know who finds it!

UPDATE: