Tech, Gaming and Food Enthusiast
Posts tagged JavaScript
Cropping images with CodeIgniter and jQuery
Aug 27th
The art to having a website with decent imagery is to allow the user/administrator to crop the images. Despite advancing web technologies, I still cannot trust a computer to scale, resize or crop an image without the resulting image being of someones foot.
There are certain ‘off-the-shelf’ products, mainly for ASP.net, with very little introduced into PHP, so I had to build my own using helpful libraries and plugins.
The Cropping
Writing a JavaScript cropping tool from scratch is no small challenge, getting a bug-free environment where all of the calculations are perfect can take weeks of hairless programming sessions and various mental breakdowns! And with my hair still in tact and mental capacity intact I implemented jCrop (I let someone else do the hard work). I am continuously reminding people that reinventing the wheel is both a waste of time, energy and sanity but the odds are against you. If a plugin is popular then the chances are that their solution will be 10 times better than yours as theirs have probably evolved over several months if not years!
JavaScript – experience enhancer or dictator
Feb 18th
A few days back it nearly ruined both my life and my sanity!
When I first started working as a commercial web developer the first idea that really hit me was the use of JavaScript and AJAX. My first senior developer always ranted on at me about ‘graceful degredation’ and I plodded along, blissfully unaware of the implications of ‘enhancing’ a website using JS.
The main issue that I was missing was that a very very very small percentage of users actually do browse with JavaScript disabled. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”, I thought. I fought for a long time with the idea that someone would actually purposefully disable a feature which makes browsing 10 times easier.
