Yesterday I blogged a simple example of how to turn an RSS feed into a tag cloud. Today reader JP commented that it would be cool if I could mimic an effect he saw in a Flash based tag cloud. Basically, as you mouse over each word, they light up. Here's what I came up with.

RIACon 2012 will be held August 6th and 7th in beautiful Rockville, MD at The Legacy Hotel and Conference Centre. The official call for speakers will begin next week, but for more information, check out the web site: http://www.riacon.com. I missed last year but hope to speak at this years conference!

Validating forms with JavaScript has been possible since the very beginning of time... or at least the introduction of LiveScript (the original name before the marketing drones got ahold of it). While it's not particular new or as exciting as Canvas based games, JavaScript form validation is one of the best uses of the language (imo) and something that can dramatically improve your user's experience. I recently had a reader ask how to do JavaScript form validation so I thought it might be nice to write up a simple tutorial. This is not meant to cover every possible way, of course, and will be a very manual approach (no frameworks or plugins!) to the problem. As always, I welcome folks comments and suggestions below.

Welcome to my third entry for my (what was at first) simple PhoneGap RSS reader. If you haven't yet, please be sure to read part 1 and part 2 so you have some context about how this application works. In this part, I'm going to tackle two enhancements suggested to me by my readers:

As a blogger, I write quite a few blog posts. I hate RTEs (Rich Text Editors) so I'll typically do most of any desired HTML by hand. Normally this isn't a big deal. My blogware can handle paragraphs and code formatting. I typically just worry about bold and italics. However, because I'm entering HTML manually, there's always a chance I could screw up. I've got a Preview feature on my blog but I rarely use it.

I've had a simple CFGRID demo sitting in my local web server for a few months now and never got around to sharing it on the blog. Today I responded to user with another CFGRID question and figured it would be good to share them both in one example. (Plus, the code has been sitting in my test.cfm file all that time and I want to get rid of it. ;) So let's start with the first example - relating one cfgrid to another.

Yesterday I blogged my experiment with downloading files to a PhoneGap application. Today I decided to take my code and try it out on iOS. Along the way I discovered a little bug, and encountered the White List issue with iOS PhoneGap apps. As with the previous entry, please note that this could possibly be done better.

Earlier today I discovered the excellent Color Thief JavaScript library by Lokesh Dhakr. Color Thief gives you the ability to find the dominant color of a picture, or a palette of major colors. Check the site for examples. I thought it would be interesting to wrap this into a PhoneGap project and create palettes based on your camera. Here's what I came up with.

One of the interesting things added in PhoneGap 1.3.0 (and something I missed until fairly recently), was support for battery events. Using these events is pretty simple so I thought I'd whip up a quick demo.

Yesterday on Twitter docwisdom asked me about using AJAX to persist form values while you edited data. This is something I've talked about before. I thought though it would be a great example to a) blog it again (I'm a believer in multiple examples, and worse case, the more I work on the client side the more comfortable I get) and b) a great time to compare a server based example versus a completely client side version using HTML5 technology.