Every wonder how to hit the ground running with a jQuery plugin? Here is the absolute complete basics for you (and me) to copy and paste…

First we need to define our Class. I’ll call mine Boom.

var Boom = function(element, options){
	this.init('boom', element, options);
};

So now we have something to focus our plugin at we can add a prototype method to it. This makes the ‘new Boom’ code super slick and gives us a better control over the ‘this’ variable because we can whack it inside a function…

Boom.prototype = {

	init:function(type, element, options)
	{
		// do stuff on create

		// makes it available almost anywhere as this.$element
		this.$element = $(element);

		// then maybe do something with the options
	},

	another_one:function()
	{
		// do some other clever stuff.
	}

};

And finally we need to connect it up to the jQuery bit…

$.fn.boom = function (options) {

	// return this makes it chainable
	return this.each(function ()
	{
		new Boom(this, options);
	});
};

$.fn.boom.Constructor = Boom;

Very basic, but worth having here for future use. You can now call it like so…

$('li.bang').boom();

When you develop a website for a client you should usually be considering three or even four (if you also include staging) environments where one code base may be used. Local, development and live.

In this case you may want the code to behave slightly differently depending on where it’s being used.

A good example I regularly come across is when and where to send any emails that a system generates. When you are testing locally or on a development server you certainly don’t want to send out emails to people who have no knowledge of the system.

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I do some sort of coding pretty much every day. It might be a tweak to a site’s design, some hardcore php Yii coding or even a bit of applescript on my mac, but I usually have something I can write, explain or rant about.

Code 365 is an attempt by me to publish a post to this blog each day through to 1st July 2013. It may be that some posts are very short and I queue several up occasionally, but the plan is generally for one each day.

I’ll be posting them to my @hjbme twitter account if you want to keep up with what I’m banging on about.

So coming up shortly, day 1 of 365. Let me know how I’m getting on.

Two hours of my life were wasted on this one, even though I’ve done it before. So…

If you want to move your ~/Sites folder into say Dropbox or AeroFS or Google Drive or SkyDrive and then you still want to point to it from its default location don’t use an alias.

I know an alias is only a ctrl-click away, but it means all sorts of pain.

Instead, move the folder to dropbox by dragging it (yes you can do this), then open Terminal and type:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sites ~/Sites

Replace Dropbox with whatever the folder of your service is called.

Restart Apache either by restarting Web Sharing in System Preference -> Sharing or by using Terminal and typing:

apachectl graceful

Cross your fingers and open a virtual host in your web browser. I fought with an Alias and all sorts of folder settings and httpd.conf lines to try and get it working, and then all I needed was to use a SymLink in its place.

Don’t worry about no longer having a ‘real’ ~/Sites folder. You don’t actually need one.

Cheers to James Galley, my desk neighbour for helping my brain to click on this one.