I find it odd that me and JavaScript don’t mix very well. I’m perfectly fine with most other scripting languages I have used, so why not JavaScript?

Its something that I really want to learn to use, being able to write it on my own (without having to struggle through searching google and manipulating code I find to suit my needs) would be a really useful skill to have – plus, JS can do some pretty cool stuff! I’m okay using the old school DOM way of manipulating small things like the style of an element with an Id (using getElementById), but when you then introduce frameworks into the mix like jQuery, it pretty much changes the syntax of everything.

Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to using frameworks (for anything) to code what I want, I enjoy doing it using the base language – it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished more, but then it’s much more time consuming to code (especially when you don’t know the language very well in the first place…).

Over the past month I’ve been using various “off the shelf” JS solutions for certain things on the sites I’ve been working on at MTC Media. Mainly tinyMCE (which I have to say after 2 months I’m now okay with using =p), Cycle,  and a few different lightboxes (shadowbox is the one I like best…). I have used a few other things, but very sparsely.

Even after working on the JS solutions above occasionally for the past 2 months at work I still find myself running into things that just stump me for a fair while. Theres a few times at work that I’ve been sat there for a good half hour figuring out (pretty simple) problems, like missing a comma or a semi-colon.
I think my main problem with it is that there isn’t really any good error detection software (that I’ve found at least) associated with JavaScript, so once I hit an error I pretty much have to go through it line by line to see where I’ve went wrong. The error console in Firefox helps a little, but it’s not great. So if anyone knows of a nice error detection plugin or something then give me a shout!

If anyone knows of any good resources for learning JS (along with using jQuery) then please do share!

I know I’ve not written anything here for 2 or 3 weeks (if not more), I’ve been pretty busy with moving out, etc. and have had fairly little that I want to blog about on here. Plus, when I get back from work I don’t really want to sit on my computer for ages (as that’s what I do at work).
I know this (technically) means that I have failed Project 52, but I’m still going to (try) and write a post a week on here, as I quite enjoy it.

Graduation!

I also graduated the other day, so go me! Along with the rest of my class at the Caird hall on Thursday the 8th of July I walked along that stage, got tapped on the head by Lord Cullen, and collected myself that upper 2nd class honours degree! I’ll be getting a picture up soon,  I just need to go home and take one first, or get the photos my mum took that day.

Heres a picture for you to enjoy of my class:

ps pictures were “stolen” from Attila Szomor as I’m still waiting to get the ones my family took and wanted to post something here…

New Beginnings

After spending the best part of the weekend clearing stuff out of my old flat and into the new it’s starting to dawn on me that things are changing at a relatively fast pace for me right now (and I’m not complaining).

First I landed myself a nice job as a Web Developer for MTC Media right here in Dundee (which I started at last month), now I find myself moving out of what I have called home for the past 3 years into a new flat, and with new flatmates (and a cat called Tiggy). I also believe that relatively soon MTC Media will be moving offices as they have expanded so much in the past year they want/need to move on to (hopefully) bigger and better things, so that’ll be another pretty big change happening relatively soon.

New Site Design?

I got thinking while I was looking at my portfolio a few days ago, and it has been the same for quite a long time now (A year? Two? I can’t remember…). I think that, along with (what seems like) the rest of my life, it’s time for a change.

No doubt it’ll take me weeks to finally get around to doing something about this as I still need to set up my desktop in the new place, and my netbook is no place to start designing a new site. I have a few ideas for it, and also want to completely revamp the back-end of it (and no I really don’t want to show anyone what is there right now – it’s that dire), integrating it with the WordPress login and authentication that I was talking about a few weeks ago.

Give me a few months (maybe in time for Christmas, but don’t hold me to that…I do work now) and I’ll see what I can come up with.

I also want to start doing some photography as a side project kind of thing in the comming months, at the moment my camera doesn’t get used enough! So expect a few posts with pictures of random things quite soon…