Melrose Solutions Blog - javascript

Turn SELECTs into Comboboxes with jQuery UI Autocomplete

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:08:00 +0100

This entry is about a script I've written using jQuery, that turns ordinary html select elements into comboboxes. You don't need to re-write any of your code, and users without JavaScript will still have fully functioning select boxes.

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Browser Bugs in IIS Logs

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:43:00 +0100

I spent several hours today wading through IIS access logs. Not the most fun part to my job, but sometimes necessary. During the course of it though, I found a subtle difference with the way clients (browsers) pass the information that goes into these logs. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else.

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Book Review: AdvancED DOM Scripting

Thu, 29 May 2008 22:46:00 +0100

The last few years have seen a huge shift towards building Rich Internet Applications, with technologies such as AJAX and DOM scripting to the fore. Unfortunately, the web is littered with bad examples. This book shows you how to do it properly.

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How to tweak IIS to improve your coldfusion sites' performance

Mon, 26 May 2008 17:36:00 +0100

Following on from yesterday's review of High Performance Web Sites, I had a quick go with YSlow, to see where I could optimise this site.

The starting point was a respectable score of C(71) for the home-page. The first rule that didn't score well was number 2: Use a Content Delivery Network. A CDN is over-kill for a blog, so that left me looking at the following rules 3 (Add Expires Header), 4 (Gzip components) and 13 (Configure Etags).

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Book Review: High Performance Web Sites

Sun, 25 May 2008 22:59:00 +0100

When a website is running slow, the traditional response has been to look at optimising the application code. In fact, 90% of the response time is taken downloading and rendering the page and it's constituent elements. In the book High Performance Web Sites, Steve Souders describes 14 rules for improving front-end performance.

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Book Review: JavaScript Phrasebook

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:16:00 +0100

Up until recently, most of my JavaScript work has been fairly minimal. Most javascript form validation is dealt with by cfform, and the main other uses have been for simple things like pop-ups. There's been a few more complex development tasks, but nothing of considerable scale.

Recently though, I've started looking at the new Ajax functionality with coldfusion 8. Although a lot of this is already in place out of the box, I realised that I needed to brush up on things.

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Book Review: JavaScript -The Definitive Guide

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 17:10:00 +0100

As the owner of over 50 IT related books, I've come to realise that the majority will fit into one of three categories:

Beginners Guides These are for people new to the specific subject, and are there to get them up to speed quickly. They're usually first spotted by the traditional 'Hello World' example, although some will start off with the very basics and give you a history on computing.
Cook Books These books are for people with plenty of experience in the subject, but are just too lazy to figure out things from scratch. As such, they are invaluable. They provide solutions to common problems, so the weary programmer doesn't have to re-invent the wheel.
Reference Books The goal here is too document every single feature of the subject.

It's this last category that JavaScript — The Definitive Guide (JSTDG) very definitely comes under.

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