Web Design Tutorials

How to Dynamically Highlight Content Like Wikipedia Using CSS3

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Dynamically Highlighting FootnotesIf you’ve ever clicked on a footnote link in a Wikipedia article, you’ve probably noticed that two things happen: (1) the link brings you to the footnote section at the bottom of the page; and (2) the selected footnote is highlighted with a different color. In a list of footnotes, this feature makes it easy for the reader to visually access the appropriate footnote.

This is a neat little technique that is accomplished easily using the CSS3 :target pseudo-class selector. Unfortunately, this is another CSS3 feature that has no support in Internet Explorer, and so has been largely overlooked up to this point.

In this brief tutorial, I’ll show you how it’s used, and also provide a quick little JavaScript solution that can be added to an IE-only external script to get it to work cross-browser. IE (all three versions) is the only browser that fails to offer support for this very practical CSS3 feature.

jQuery Tutorial for Beginners: Nothing But the Goods

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jQuery Tutorial for BeginnersNot too long ago I wrote an article for Six Revisions called Getting Started with jQuery that covered some important things (concept-wise) that beginning jQuery developers should know. This article is the complete opposite; there’s no concepts, no principles, and very little lecturing — just some straight example code with brief descriptions demonstrating what you can do with jQuery.

This fast-paced tutorial should be able to get beginners up and running with jQuery very quickly, while also providing a good overview of what jQuery is capable of (although jQuery’s capabilities go far beyond this beginning tutorial).

Keep in mind that this tutorial is just a bunch of straightforward, superficial code examples and very brief explanations for beginners who want to avoid all the jargon and complexities. But I still highly recommend that all beginners get past this stuff by means of a good book, some more in-depth tutorials online, or by using the jQuery documentation.

Inject Custom Ad Blocks Between Paragraphs in WordPress

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How to Inject Custom Ad Blocks Between Paragraphs in Older WordPress PostsIt’s common nowadays for bloggers to monetize their blogs through the use of strategically-placed ad blocks. BuySellAds ad blocks are the most popular in the web design community. You’ll sometimes also see AdSense ads placed at the top of articles or in other spots.

It becomes a bit of a challenge, however, to include ads in older posts. Nobody wants to go through and edit each post, adding customized code manually, which could be quite time consuming.

The best way to do this is to put the ad code in your single.php page, outside of the function that displays the post. Unfortunately, with this method, the ads are limited in location to either the top or bottom of the article. In this tutorial, I’m going to describe some JavaScript that I wrote that will dynamically embed a custom ad block between paragraphs in all your WordPress posts.

Ajax From the Ground Up: Part 3 — Getting a Response From the Server

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Ajax From the Ground Up: Part 3Last year I began a series called “Ajax From the Ground Up”, that consisted of two articles describing how to implement Ajax from scratch using pure JavaScript. Because I was busy with other things, and due to minimal interest shown in the articles, I never wrote the third part to the series.

But I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it permanently unfinished, so with this article, I’ll complete the 3-part series that will teach you how to fully implement Ajax calls in your pages using raw JavaScript.

Recreating CNN’s Beveled Navigation Buttons with Pure CSS

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Beveled Navigation Buttons with Pure CSSWhen CNN recently redesigned their website, they created a strongly-branded and beautiful header section that includes a navigation bar with beveled buttons. Although CNN’s navigation bar utilizes CSS sprites for highlighted and active buttons, the primary design of the buttons (the beveled effect) is done with pure CSS.

I think this is a common-known technique among experienced developers, but many beginning web designers will probably resort to images to create this effect, which is not necessary. So, in this brief tutorial I’ll show you how to create a navigation bar with beveled edges using pure CSS, identical to that on CNN.

A JavaScript Content Switcher That Works Without JavaScript

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A JavaScript Content Switcher That Works Without JavaScriptRecently, while doing research/work on a completely unrelated topic, I came across the beautiful illustrations on Rype Arts, which are displayed inside of a JavaScript-driven content switcher. For some reason, I happened to visit the page with JavaScript disabled and noticed that the content switcher was still working (albeit, with a few flaws).

At first I couldn’t figure out how it was functioning. Normally, with JavaScript disabled, this type of content switcher (or content slider) will just display one item, or else display all items, without allowing any “switching” functionality. After some poking around, I realized it’s not a very difficult thing to do. The switcher utilizes in-page anchors and overflow: hidden to keep the switchability intact.

A Stationary Logo That Changes on Page Scroll with CSS

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A Stationary Logo That Changes on Page ScrollThe Econsultancy marketing blog has an interesting little effect using CSS that causes their logo to change when the page is scrolled. Visit their page and scroll down. You’ll notice the logo changes from a solid version to an outline version.

If you know CSS fairly well, or have investigated some of the sites on css Zen Garden, then you’re probably aware that this technique uses the CSS background-attachment property.

Deep Linking in JavaScript and Ajax Applications

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Deep Linking in JavaScript and Ajax ApplicationsLast week I posted a tutorial that demonstrated using a simple application how to implement progressive enhancement into your Ajax projects. The one major flaw in the final Ajax-driven page from that tutorial is the lack of deep linking when JavaScript is enabled.

Although the resulting code is clean, works well, and is easy to maintain, the lack of deep linking is enough to cause a client to balk at the use of progressive enhancement in such a circumstance. So, in this brief tutorial, I’ll describe how to incorporate deep linking into that page.

If you haven’t already gone through the previous tutorial, doing so might help you get up to speed — but it’s not absolutely necessary, since the code we’ll be using is pretty straightforward.

Building an Ajax Application with Progressive Enhancement

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Building an Ajax Application with Progressive EnhancementIf you’ve done your best to keep up with web development trends over the past five years or more, then it’s likely that you’re familiar with the concept of Progressive Enhancement. I’m not going to provide an explanation of that technique here, but instead, I thought I would demonstrate using a small Ajax-driven page how progressive enhancement can be implemented.

The mini-app we’ll be building in this tutorial is an employee information page. It will consist of a series of links at the top of the page that will determine what employee info is displayed in the content area. The information will be held inside of include files, to simplify the process (as opposed to a database or XML file which might be more practical in a real-world app). Although we’re going to use Ajax to display the information, we’re going to ensure that the same information is displayed even when the user is visiting the page without JavaScript capabilities.

The Right Way to Add Custom List Markers to Unordered Lists

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Custom List MarkersMost experienced web developers now understand that using CSS’s built-in method for adding custom list markers (also referred to as “bullets”) to style an unordered list is not an option. The unpredictable bugs that occur in Internet Explorer when using the list-style-image property render that method quite useless.

Fortunately, because of CSS’s inherent flexible nature, we can still customize the list marker on an unordered list. This is done by placing a background image on the list items. Here’s how most developers do this:

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