Christian Heilmann

Author Archive

Event Handling versus Event Delegation

Sunday, September 24th, 2006

If you ever wondered how flexible web applications with hundreds of objects that need event handling are built, the trick behind it is called “Event Delegation”.

I didn’t come up with it, and it is nothing new either, but as some people seem to get confused when the term crops up, I’ve written a quick example why event delegation helps keeping web apps light and fast.

Seven simple examples for the YUI Panel Widget

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Following some feedback of a training session in several offices over the last few weeks, I’ve put together [link:http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/yuipanel/,some simple examples] on how to implement the [link:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/container/panel/,Yahoo! User Interface Library Panel Widget].

Of course, this cannot replace the [link:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/docs/container/YAHOO.widget.Panel.html,real documentation], which has a lot more important information, but I hope it’ll get you going and eager to learn more. I’ve implemented Panel in some products so far, and I love how easy it is. Especially the contextual positioning is a real time saver.

Enjoy, and I hope this makes things a bit easier.

[tags]webdevtrick,yui,panels,dhtml windowing[/tags]

Search now with AutoComplete

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I just enhanced the site search here with an autocomplete option using the [link:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/autocomplete/,YUI AutoComplete Widget]. Just type in anything and you’ll get a list of post titles to choose from. Selecting the title automatically gets you to the entry.

I had this dynamic first, using a PHP script to poll the database, but it seems the load is too much. Anyone interested in a step – by – step how to do it yourself?

Search AutoComplete in action

Give this blog a new home…

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Seeing that I spend too much time fixing and maintaining the server for this, I am now looking for someone who can offer me sponsored hosting for this blog. In return, there’ll be a big “thanks to X for hosting” on the blog and people will love you forever.

What I need is:

  • WordPress
  • Fast connection
  • FTP access
  • Spam protection (Askimet?)
  • MySQL
  • emails (optional)

In terms of traffic, in 2006 so far I had 358,003 page loads and 255,357 visitors (which doesn’t include the RSS feeds). Average seems to be about 8 GB / month.

Hope someone out there is happy to lend a helping hand…

No more URLs in comments, please

Monday, September 11th, 2006

Ok, I am sick and tired of getting ninety spam comments to one half-interesting comment on this blog. Therefore I turned off any link submitting in the comments and do not display the URL of the author automatically any longer.

I am sorry I had to do this – and I will display your URL when you commit a sensible comment, but I’d rather spend my time writing books than updating my spam filters every two days.

I only hope that each and every one of these lowlife spammers ends up in jail with a bunch of men pumped full of viagra who had penis operations that made them huge and have lots of stamina and energy due to whatever crappy drug that is sold over the pond at this time of year.