jQuery Word/Character Counter

Just a quick jQuery post that calculates the number of words/characters in a form input field. Needed one of these recently for a work project and its really easily to implement and works like a charm

Compressing jQuery / Javascript with PHP

This is a quick little tip that I've been using on my most recent projects to significantly reduce the size of Javascript code. This comes in handy when using frameworks and although jQuery (my framework of choice) is quite small to begin some libraries like Prototype combined with script.aculo.us come in at quite a large file size.

Using this small modification I reduced the size of jQuery along with my own Javascript code from 55kb to around 16kb with one less trip to the server. All of the compression is done on the server side using PHP so if a visitor's browser does not support G-Zip then they will just receive the original uncompressed files.

jQuery Accordion Menu

This is my first article about the wonderful jQuery Javascript library, its been my library of choice for around a year and it's ideal for web development because of it's small size and powerful selector methods.

I'm going to go through the process of creating an expandable/collapsible navigation menu that has a series of top level links with each having a number of sub links. When a top level link is clicked the menu expands and shows the related sub links. An example of which is shown below:

• Heading
  • Sub Heading
  • Sub Heading
  • Sub Heading
• Heading
  • Sub Heading
  • Sub Heading
  • Sub Heading
• Heading
  • Sub Heading
  • Sub Heading
  • Sub Heading