Create a Mashup from Scratch1 Comment »

In this tutorial we are going to create a search Mashup which searches for books and shows the category of the search string. We will cover the basics required for making of any mashup.Let’s get started !!

Tutorial Structure

• What is a Mashup?
• Setting up workspace.
• Tutorial

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Win Some Chuck Swag with Brenelz Web Solutions…6 Comments »

 

Today we will finish up our Chuck series that was based on getting some new Big Bang Theory viewers… Below you will find reasons 4 and 5.

But before you read those, I would like to inform you that I will be giving away some chuck swag to one lucky winner.

As with any contest you have to do something for me first….

1. Follow me on Twitter (@brenelz)
2. Tweet This
3. Comment below with a link to your tweet
3. Watch Chuck Season 3!

Winner will be selected randomly…

University of Winnipeg Konami Code Revealed!3 Comments »

Seems that some people are still having some trouble finding the konami code for the DCE website.

Today I have decided to make it real easy for you by walking you through it, but there is a catch…

Make sure to follow all the U of W twitter accounts (@uwinnipegDCE, @uwinnipegDCE_IT, @uwinnipegDCE_PS) as well as my own (@brenelz).

Also subscribe via my RSS Feed to keep up-to-date on my web tutorials…

Scroll down to find out the “secret code”!

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Default and configuration objects with JavaScript1 Comment »

written by Dan Wellman

Anyone that’s written a jQuery plugin will know how easy it is to create an object containing default configuration properties for the plugin which the implementing developer can override with a configuration object passed to the plugin at initialization time.

It’s an incredibly useful mechanism for ensuring that your plugins work out of the box but are still highly configurable. But what if you want to implement this functionality but you aren’t writing a jQuery plugin? Thankfully it’s easy to replicate this behavior with plain vanilla JavaScript.

Let’s say for example that you have some code which sets the background-color of the page at load time, and the default background-color is blue; in our script file we could use the following JavaScript:

setBgcolor = {
	defaults: {
		color: "blue"
	},
	init: function(config) {

		var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
		body.style.backgroundColor = setBgcolor.defaults.color;
	}
}

Our simple functionality is namespaced using the setBgcolor object. This object contains two keys; default and init, defaults is an object containing the default configuration properties (a single property, color, is all this object contains) and init is our initialization method. Within this method we simply get a pointer to the body of the page and then set its backgroundColor style property to the string contained within color property of the defaults object. Simple.

To execute this code all we (or another developer) would need to do would use the following code in the HTML page:

setBgcolor.init();

But what if the developer implementing our code wanted to choose a different color to set the body of the page? Notice that we specified that our init method can accept a parameter – the config parameter. This can be used to accept an object specified in the call to the init method, like this:

setBgcolor.init({ color: "red" });

How do we get our code to use this value instead? That’s easy too, all we need is to add the following code within the init method (before the backgroundColor is set):

if(config) {
	for(prop in config){
		setBgcolor.defaults[prop] = config[prop];
	}
}

If the config parameter exists we iterate over each of its properties and overwrite the corresponding property in the defaults object. This is a simple but powerful technique for implementing default and configuration objects which allow you to configure your code sensibly while giving developers control over the values used in configuration.

University of Winnipeg Konami Code1 Comment »

This week I was made aware of a neat easter egg on a site I visit regularly. The University of Winnipeg Division of Continuing Education has embedded a konami code into their website.

A konami code you might ask? Well the simple explanation is that it is a cheat code which allows you to access some “secret” content.

So this raises two questions for you… what is the cheat code? and what is the “secret content” on the U of W continuing education website? Obviously I can’t tell you this, but I can give you some very vague hints.

Hint 1: Cheat Code – Google Search: University of Winnipeg Konami Code

Hint 2: Secret Content – A classic flash game with a U of W twist

Hint 3: URL: http://dce.uwinnipegcourses.ca/

PS: Bet you can’t beat my high score (Look for Brenelz)

The University of Winnipeg DCE offers flash/actionscript courses that will give you the skills needed to create a flash game similar to the one found above. If you are looking for a full-time internet course, I would suggest their Internet System Specialist Diploma, AKA ISSD. It covers a variety of things such as:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Flash
• PHP
• Perl

They have recently added a Web 2.0 Technology class as well, which sounds real interesting!

Also be sure to check out their blog and follow them on twitter (uwinnipegDCE, uwinnipegDCE_IT, uwinnipegDCE_PS)

Remember that I am not just a blogger and I offer many web services to my clients. If you are in need of any web work, you can get a hold of me through the contact form on this website.

Any other examples of easter eggs you can think of?