Toolbox – Insert Text into TinyMCE at cursor

Posted November 25th, 2009 in Featured, JQuery, Toolbox, Web Development by Jon

In my mind, I can hear the them to Picture Pages playing in the background – because I want to remind you that in my quest to be a better web developer (and share with the world) I started this “toolbox” so I could keep a cataloged stockpile of simple easy to use tricks to make my life easier – plus I wanted to share…

This is documented somewhere on TinyMCE’s site, but it’s may not be easy to find. It’s simple little trick that I use as a helper to a simple image manager to go along with TinyMCE (since you have to pay for an image manager).

In my day to day life, it seems like I need a backend to every site I build, no one wants simple pages anymore. So I end up with a lot of forms, which have a lot of textareas in them. I like using TinyMCE as the wysiwyg editor for those textareas. This also calls for adding images and TinyMCE charges for the built in feature above using a url for an image. This presented me with a problem, I have end users who aren’t savvy enough to upload images (FTP) and then get the url to add the image to the editor, but they want images.

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ToolBox – Preloading With Jquery

Posted November 12th, 2009 in Featured, JQuery, Toolbox by Jon

I thought I’d start a new Category called “Toolbox”, specifically for what I use on a daily basis for web development. These are snippets, functions, cheats, etc that anyone can use and make my life as a web developer that much easier…

This installment is something I’ve been using lately to preload images so they don’t spit out the alt text…Mostly it seems to happen when I’m doing something with ajax.

I found this snippet at Matt Farina’s blog.

This is the code (I just made a js file out of it and include it when necessary).

jQuery.preloadImages = function()
{
  for(var i = 0; i<arguments.length;i++) {
      jQuery("<img>").attr("src", arguments[i]);
  }
}

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The new V[isitors]

Posted November 4th, 2009 in Asides by Jon

So who caught this show the othe night? While I’m old enough to remember the original, and sadly have watched episodes of the series recently, I thought I’d give it a whirl. It was decent, something to fill the void, but man could it be any more transparent?
The who bit on universal health care, using the media, and youth groups wasn’t very discrete – even though I liked that. I’ve noticed lately a lot of picks at the Obama adminstration lately on tv and I think it’s pretty awesome.
I’ll continue to watch for no othe reason then it having some Firefly actors on it -as long as it stays interesting to…