Today I was trying to figure out a way to apply some functionality to a given set of anchor tags on a web page. Basically, I wanted to be able to add a function to all of the anchor tags on a page that link to an image file. The first thing that came to mind for how to handle this, was jQuery. It was made for this sort of thing. I knew I could do it with jQuery, it just took me a little bit to figure out the right syntax for doing it. So, I had to figure out a way to write a jQuery selector that said “give me all of the anchor tags on the page where the href attribute contains an image file extension”. So I did a little bit of searching, and stumbled across this article on how to use predicate selectors in jQuery. The syntax I ended up with was:

   1: $("a[@href *= '.jpg']")

BRILLIANT! (yes, I know, I still need to figure out how to OR the other image type extensions (.gif, .png, etc) together into the “contains” predicate, but that’s the easy part really). I couldn’t put it any more clearly than, or agree with this statement any more (pardon the language):

The more I read up on jQuery, the more I realize how sweet-a** it is. jQuery is the “Easy” button of the user interface world.

That says it all for me right there. Before I was introduced to jQuery, I hated doing JavaScript of any kind in my web apps. Now, having jQuery, I go out of my way to look for ways to use it…its THAT cool.

I thought this was fascinating. Visuals of relational information derived from the Bible. Very cool stuff. The image below is a visual arc representing cross references from the Bible. Awesome.

For what its worth to anyone that might read this, my recent experience with the purchase of my new MacBook Pro through MacMall has been fantastic. The process of ordering the computer was quick and easy. The people I’ve talked to (yes, I was actually connected directly to a human when I called, after a single level of voicemail system where I told it what I was calling for - to place an order) have been friendly and helpful. The experience has been great. I think the thing that I noticed most, that prompted me to write this at all, was the fact that I just received a phone call from the account rep that I placed my order with, in which she reminded me to not forget to fill out the mail-in-rebate forms so that I could claim the rebates that I was offered with my purchase. The thing that stands out to me about that is the fact that, in my experience in the past, the whole point of mail-in-rebates is the hope that at least a percentage of people will either be too lazy or will not remember to fill them out. For a company to make a point to call a customer to remind them to fill out and send in the rebate forms to me is remarkable enough that its worth telling people about.

So, if you’re ever in the market for any Apple products, be it a computer, an iPod or iPhone, whatever…I can personally, highly recommend MacMall.com.

So…my new toy arrived yesterday afternoon, and I got to play with it for the first time last night. Obviously, its too soon to gush too much, but I will say that, without a doubt, the out-of-box-experience was nice, and the first six hours with it were very nice…and maybe most importantly, stable. I was able to watch videos, listen to music, read documents…SCROLL…all without a single problem or crash. VERY refreshing indeed.

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Scott Hanselman:

In a recent MVC design meeting someone said something like “we’ll need a Repeater control” and a powerful and very technical boss-type said:

“We’ve got a repeater control, it’s called a foreach loop.”

That is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that has me so excited about the MVC extensions to ASP.NET.