Evan Sims

jQuery: Autoscale Element to Parent Width

Recently I’ve been working on a proposed redesign of my school’s online course interface; one of the requirements for my prototype was to create a fairly scalable, fluid interface that will work in any browser. This isn’t difficult in and of itself, but it made another goal of mine somewhat complicated: to make embedded video look good and scale well.

Having already decided to use jQuery, the single greatest tool in my web development arsenal (second only to PHP itself, hehe), I did some searching to try and find some existing code that could scale my videos and images proportionally. I found a couple chunks of code, but neither of them were exactly what I needed, and one was completely busted.

So, I decided to combine a bit of what I’d saw and whip together my own take on it.

Continue Reading ‘jQuery: Autoscale Element to Parent Width’ …

FriendFeed Activity Widget Released

The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up.

Give it a look.

Squawk acquired by German social networking firm

I’m pleased to announce that Squawk (my Second Life tool for integrating Twitter, Jaiku, del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia) has been acquired by a social networking firm located in Germany. I’ll be working with the company over the next few days, helping them migrate all the assets over to their side of things. Once the move is complete and I get the OK, I’ll divulge the name of the company and hopefully be able to share with you some of the plans they have for the tool.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s supported Squawk over these past six months of development. You’ve been a wonderful bunch of folks!