So dur­ing a brief chat I had yes­ter­day with an old friend from high school, I heard (or read, actu­ally) some­thing that caught my atten­tion. She let me know that she sets 90-day goals for her­self. Set­ting goals is a con­cept I’m quite famil­iar with; but that 90-day thing… that’s new. I, like many other peo­ple in my field, have mixed feel­ings about dead­lines and, as a result, vary­ing reac­tions to them, be they self-imposed or oth­er­wise. How­ever, I fig­ured I could give this 3-month jazz a shot. At the very least, it’d force me to… well… blog, I guess. So I want to com­mit to blog­ging about my progress in meet­ing these 2 major goals (I’ve decided that I can work on no more than 2 things at a time)…

“Pro­jec­tize” out​ofre​pose​.com

Huh? Wha? Yeah. I’m gonna put this puppy through the entire SDLC. I’ll post require­ments (one of which will be to put to use the sec­ond project I’ll be dis­cussing with you). I’ll dis­cuss Word­Press plu­gin can­di­dates (I’ve decided to stick with Word­Press for this blog and forego a home-grown CMS for now). I’ll talk about the mock-ups. And I’ll do this with any­one who’s inter­ested enough to leave com­ments. Effec­tive imme­di­ately. I’ll cre­ate a new cat­e­gory for that, and I’ll add a link to the main navigation.

In order for me to do that, though, I need to clean up just a few things around here, just so things are a lit­tle eas­ier to find. OK? OK.

Look for changes on Sunday.

Write a JavaScript Library

It used to be, before the advent of com­pre­hen­sive and well-maintained libraries/frameworks like jQuery and Pro­to­type, that devel­op­ers and design­ers would have to jury-rig their own JavaScript in order to get some inter­ac­tiv­ity inte­grated into their sites. That involved a lot of copy­ing and past­ing from places like DHTML Lab or Dynamic Drive (my per­sonal favorite was Young­pup), and spend­ing sleep­less nights try­ing to dis­en­tan­gle the mys­tery behind window.load, or why pop-ups weren’t cen­ter­ing as expected. Good, clean fun yielded hor­ri­ble, dirty code. Now, years later, a lot of folks have smartened up, some loosely enforced stan­dards have been cre­ated, and lots of us are mini­fy­ing and name­spacing and ref­er­enc­ing exter­nal files that house all of the logic needed to let all of that new­fan­gled “fancy” rip all over our well-formed markup. And while I appre­ci­ate (and heav­ily imple­ment) all of the hard work put into mak­ing sure devel­op­ers don’t need to rein­vent the wheel on every project, I feel as though I could ben­e­fit some from writ­ing up a small library fit for my needs. Here, reader, are my needs:

A cool namespace

This is because I’m a nerd, and bears lit­tle to no impor­tance on the suc­cess of this project (although name­spacing is always a great thing). I’m think­ing some­thing like OOR or GUILLE, or even GRIA (inci­den­tally, more on the cur­rent sta­tus of that Gria endeavor will come in a later post… let’s just say for now that there’s noth­ing going on).

Sen­si­ble Event Handling

I need a com­mon sense inter­face into all of the super-important DOM events. Event han­dling can be a pretty heady thing, so I just want to be able to call a method or two with some para­me­ters and know that every­thing sci­ency is being taken care of in a cross-browser friendly, effi­cient way. Plus, I’ll need an equiv­a­lent to jQuery’s $(document).ready().

Ele­ments and stuff

I’m going to have to extend some built-in ele­ments to inter­act with them in a more desir­able way, but I don’t want to add too much fluff to them.

Effects

show, hide, animate, etc.

Object detec­tion

Until we don’t need it, we need it.

I’ll be throw­ing all of this into a GitHub repos­i­tory as well, which is also new but doesn’t really count as a full project.

OK. So… blog activ­ity cometh!