Eric Martin - The blog, projects and photography of Eric Martin

In case you haven't heard, jQuery 1.3 has been released! In addition to being jQuery's 3rd birthday, the team has a number of new announcements, including Sizzle (a brand new CSS selector engine), a new API browser (developed by Remy Sharp) and the formation of the jQuery Foundation.

I tested SimpleModal (tests and demos) with jQuery 1.3 and everything seems to be working as expected. After reading about all of the speed improvements, I thought it would be interesting to run some tests (Firebug 1.3 Profiler) comparing the SimpleModal demos with jQuery 1.2.6 and jQuery 1.3:

I haven't looked into why 1.3 has more calls for the Contact Form, but even so, the execution time (ms) has improved for each one!

Congratulations to the jQuery team and Happy Birthday!

As I mentioned before, in 2009, I plan to explore my interest in photography more. Since I'm not quite ready to commit to a daily project, my brother-in-law and I decided to do a weekly assignment.

We set up a group on Flickr, called Assignment52, where a new assignment will be announced each week. The assignments will range from trying specific techniques to more general topics.

At the end of each week, everyone is encouraged to pick their favorite photo from the pool (not your own) and post it in the assignment thread.

So, if you are interested and up for a challenge, jump in and get started with Assignment 1...there's only a few days left ;)

Having already reflected on 2008 for my family, I thought I'd look back at what has happened "professionally" over the last year and make some resolutions for 2009.

Read more »

While working on a new site design, I found an interesting bug in WordPress 2.7. I created two new pages to use as "Front page displays", one called Blog and one called Home. To create the pages, I clicked on Pages > Add New, entered a Title and clicked Publish.

I then went to my Reading Settings (Settings > Reading) and set the static Front and Posts page to the pages I just created. Going back to my site, I tested out the new static pages only to find they didn't work.

Read more »

Includes IE6 positioning bug fixes reported by Deepak Mehta and James Taylor.

• Removed iframe option (use wmode property for object and embed elements)
• Fixed IE positioning issues (including horizontal scrolling)
• Updated jQuery version requirement to 1.2.2
• Added horizontal scrolling test and more position option tests

Links: Project Page | jQuery Plugins Page

Includes bug fixes reported by calderon.joe (thanks joe):

• Fixed iframe errors when iframe option set to false
• Fixed auto centering to use data width/height if container width/height is not set

Also changed the default for the iframe option to false.

Links: Project Page | jQuery Plugins Page

After almost 11 months, I have finally released an update to SimpleModal.

This release fixes a number of browser related issues (mostly with IE) but also adds a few new features.

Some of the features include:

• Automatic centering of the modal dialog, unless overridden with the new position option
• Ability to call $.modal.close(); from the onClose callback without causing infinite loop
• Eliminated the need for external CSS for IE6 dialog positioning
• Added a zIndex option for compatibility with other plugins
• Element resizing when the browser size is changed
• Added an IFRAME to every modal dialog to prevent object bleed-through

Please see the project page for a full list of features, changes and upgrading instructions.

I also updated the demos, including the contact form, which now has the option to display a subject and cc field, UTF-8 support and minor security features.

If you find any issues or have any questions, please let me know.

Tired of carving the same 'ol pumpkin every year, I thought I'd try something different this year. I free-handed the WordPress logo on the pumpkin then carefully carved it out.

WordPress Pumpkin set on Flickr.