JQuery

So code cleanup is going really well.  In the process I have really polished up my CSS/XHTML/Javascript skills.  The core software for RGB Daily, Pligg, is written with Prototype and  Script.aculo.us on the front end.  A couple of the custom plugins that where written use JQuery though. Working my way thorugh bugs I became really impressed with jQuery and decided to find out more about its author, John Resig.  Turns out he lives in Boston and also works for Mozilla now.  He is definitely my kinda architect.  In the pocess of two days I pretty much taught myself jQuery.

I started out just wanting to get rid of the ugly dialogs that the alert/confirm javascript functions produced.  I learned a lot from a plugin called Impromptu, written by Trent Richardson.  After figuring out how Prototype was stomping over the “$” shorthand of jQuery I was on my way (I’m a Java guy, not use to that kind of wild west stuff).  I hacked the CSS and added some convenience wrapper classes to implement replacements for the native prompt functions.  Here is a quick pic of what I was able to achieve:

So I’m showing a little more than just the confirm dialog.  In the coming weeks I’ll be giving a little more guidance on what RGB Daily actually does and for what communities it serves.  For now you can have a look and speculate

As for updates on soft launch…  Still looks like September is reasonable.  At this point to be honest I just want to make the core production ready.  That means a bug free UI (address known bugs from internal testing) and a server side that is built for scale on clustered LAMP.