Author: Ashish Datta

Ashish graduated from Tufts University with a BS in computer science. Prior to Setfive Consulting, he worked at ArmchairGM and later Wikia. He has a disposition for single malt scotch and believes drinking on patios constitutes “being outdoorsy”. Connect with him on Quora, LinkedIn, or Google+

WeGov.com out the door

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on WeGov.com out the door

Wow two in one day! Well it has taken some time, but along with the WeGov team we launched WeGov.com this morning.

From the site’s about us:

WeGov.com is the most comprehensive, nonpartisan platform for civic engagement, political participation, and organizational activism. WeGov provides a free and open environment for groups, campaigns, and like-minded citizens to organize themselves, easily reach elected officials, and magnify their influence as a VerifiedVoter™.

We’re really excited to see where WeGov goes and how it will reshape the online political landscape. For WeGov media and press inquiries, please email info@wegov.com. Otherwise, to get in touch with us shoot off an email to contact@setfive.com.

Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day weekend.

Run jQuery each() serially

By Ashish Datta | 2 Comments on Run jQuery each() serially

jQuery.each() is pretty sweet but earlier today I wanted to run some animations across a set of three elements and since the animate() calls are non-blocking everything was happening at the same time. What I wanted to do was have the functions execute in a serial fashion (1 after the other).

I poked around and it doesn’t look like there’s a native way to do this. After a bit I decided to just whip something up and see how it works. Here’s what I had originally:

That ran fine but everything happened at the same time. The modified serial code looks like:

Basically, what it does is after the first element, the code will delay execution of the each() function until the hasCallbackCompleted flag is set for the correct element.

jQuery blank() modified for password fields

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on jQuery blank() modified for password fields

We’ve been using Jeff Hui’s very awesome jquery.blank plugin for sometime over at Setfive HQ. What blank() is allow you to basically move the labels for text inputs into the input themselves (to save space). We use this technique frequently for login boxes in headers since it’s easier not to have to stick in labels next to text boxes.

The problem is, you can’t use blank() on a password field since a password field won’t display clear text (obviously). To get around this, I’ve always manually stuck in a “shadow” text box next to the password field and toggled the text box or password box in order to make blank() work correctly.

Anyway, I finally got tired of doing this so I decided to patch the plugin to do this automatically. Jeff incorporated the code back into blank() and it’s available on GitHub here.

Happy coding.

PHP: Adding variables in the current scope

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on PHP: Adding variables in the current scope

So earlier today I was working on a Facebook App and wanted to use “partials” in a similar fashion as Symfony’s partials. At this point, I realized I had no idea how Symfony placed variables into the current execution scope when you do things like

include_partial("somePartial", array("foo" => $foo, "bar" => $bar));

A bit of digging led me to the extract() function in PHP.

From the documentation, “extract — Import variables into the current symbol table from an array”.

Pretty neat.

Cool kid stuff: Sizzle for PHP!?

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Cool kid stuff: Sizzle for PHP!?

Every now and then, I’ll end up having to scrape HTML pages for some content. I know, I know, there’s like a bazillion different ways to do this, but I *really* like doing it in PHP so I can jack right into Symfony. Usually, I just get down and dirty with the PHP DOM and use XPath to select nodes within the document. The problem with this is that the XPath sucks and the PHP implementation sucks…alot.

But hold on, we know a selector engine that doesn’t suck! The jQuery selector engine, called Sizzle is probably one of the best CSS/DOM selector engines to use. Turns out there is a PHP port! Enter phpQuery

At its root, phpQuery is a port of the jQuery selector syntax to PHP. Additionally, phpQuery includes dozens of the jQuery traversal methods like next(), prev(), find(), and so on. It also implements the CSS3 filters like :first, :last, :eq, ect.

Anyway, if you’re tired of suffering through the PHP XPath implementation and dig jQuery then you should definitely give phpQuery a whirl.