The web has so many useful services now, many offering their own API that you can draw data from and create your own mashups with. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Kongregate are just a few.
Their data output is most commonly formatted in RSS (for feed readers), and JSON (a lighter form than XML used a lot for AJAX). In this post I’ll show you how to use the cURL library to collect data from any public web page. Continue reading
For those that don’t know, the Google AJAX Feed API is a JavaScript tool that you can use to handle your AJAX requests, and is particularly useful for reading in feed data from external websites. After searching for all kinds of plug-ins and tools, I landed on Google’s answer, and found exactly what I needed – a JavaScript-only feed parsing script.
This tutorial will provide you with a very basic script to start using this great tool and covers what you need to get started.
Just a quick demonstration today on using JavaScript and CSS techniques to create scrolling backgrounds. Here we layer backgrounds on top of each other and change their horizontal position to move them past the viewing area. It also uses different multipliers to move the closer objects quicker, and create a parallax effect.
When opening new windows from your web page that link to external files, a common practice is to open them in a new window as not to deter the user from your site.
One method to do this in the past was to use target="_blank" that tells the browser to open the link’s href attribute in a new window. This, however, is deprecated in the Strict Doctype of W3C web standards so we should be trying to avoid using it whenever we can, and in this post I’ll show you exactly how it’s done.