Reinventing the Wheel
So I am working on a site that has a voting scheme built in to it. I decided right of the bat to use Jquery with a star rating plugin. It is used all over the place and looks very slick. So I started around 7 or 8 last night, downloaded the plugin, and got to work. The original worked with radio buttons, which immediatly seemed to make sense, since it is essentially what you are going for, but as I started to get into it, it didn’t work out right for me. It’s four o’clock in the morning so I can’t remember why I initially was displeased with the main jQuery plugin, I think it had something to do with the layout. But I came across another one that used list boxes, I liked that idea, but I didn’t like how he implemented it. only the star you currently are hovering over is lit up, not the ones before it.
Now here, let me caveat into why radio buttons don’t appeal to me. I like to make my sites work just as well without javascript as I can. I know that according to w3 95% of browsers search with javascript enabled, so I am only catering to 5%, which as I’m writing this seems pathetic. Anyway with the original plugin, if you have javascript disabled you end up with a bunch of radio boxes side by side, and no individual labels. I don’t care for that. I want to be able to label my items. So a select box made more sense to me.
So anyway, now that it is past four in the morning, I have succesfully writtem my first jQuery plugin, I have created another plugin to add to all the other jQuery star plugins out there.
Posted under Uncategorized