The slider functionality in the Series section (and other sections) is copyrighted to Erik Arvidsson (2002) and released in 2006 under Apache Software License 2.0. I found the javascript slider functionality through Chirag Mehta’s cool work on the Tagline Generator, which I hope to implement here soon.

The slider itself is a bit clunky. Probably my fault because I know enough about Javascript to be dangerous, but not enough to actually fix it. It may smooth itself out when there are many items through which to scroll.

I chose a slider for scrolling through content on these section pages because I wanted something that differed from your standard “blog category link list”page. Also I love sliders. I think they’re incredibly useful for getting through a lot of content. Since the human eye/brain is capable of recognizing shapes even when they’re moving very quickly, it makes for a fairly efficient way to scan through content.

Before I discovered the Tagline Generator, I’d searched high and low for a JQuery content slider. What I found, ad nauseam, were tutorials for reproducing the Apple product browser slider. Yawn. No, the Apple implementation is really cool. But seriously, how many tutorials for the same thing do we really need?

Anyway few of those dealt with text (vs. images). And none that I looked at allowed for variable height. Because I’m dealing with dynamic data, variable height is critical—there might be ten items; there might be a hundred. Speaking on which, I’m not sure how this solution will hold up over time. It could get really bogged down when there are many, many items . . .

The Tagline Generator is built with fixed height in mind. But I was easily able to modify it to variable height. Which is way more than I can say for the other, um, 20 slider tutorials I tried. For whatever reason, fixed height was baked into each of them.

I modified the JS further by using a variable to position the starting point on each page load. So if you click a “IxD is dead” series link on any page, the Series page slider will show “IxD is dead” as the default view. Pretty nifty. That only took me two days. Really, I should learn the syntax and underpinnings of Javascript. Far more efficient than my trial-and-error methods.

The Series functionality itself is a Wordpress plugin from Darren Etheir. I’m using the back-end piece to connect articles to their series. The front-end display piece is written in PHP because I wanted more control over the visual design and output parameters.