JavaScript can be employed on your website to perform an whole multitude of simple, but quite effective, tasks that make your job as a web developer that little bit easier. Over time, we have compiled a library of these little JavaScript snippets and we have listed a few of our favourites here.
On a recent project, we were required to create a drop down list to display the UK’s counties as part of a web form collecting users addresses. We assumed that this would be a pretty standard task and that there would be an abundance of pre-configured lists available on the Internet for download. After about an hour of research, it became clear that it was not going to be that simple. All of the lists we unearthed were either incomplete or out of date and it seems that we were not the first developers to run into this trouble.
You can see how it is easy to get it wrong though, take a look at the Wikipedia list of UK counties. The list of counties has changed quite considerably over time, especially in Wales.
Having an RSS feed on your website is a great way of sharing your content with the rest of the Internet. It’s not a new technology and it’s probably something that you use on a daily basis. If you have a blog or use any form of CMS, that software will most likely handle the creation of your RSS feed for you.
Sometimes, however, it might be necessary for you to create a RSS feed yourself. Perhaps you have just won a new client who’s current site has an old bespoke CMS which they like and want to keep, but you want to be able to publish their updated content via RSS. Hopefully this tutorial will help you to achieve this.
RSS, in its current form, stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a family of web formats to publish frequently updated content. The RSS Feed (as it is commonly known) can then be read by the users feed reading software or by another website which wishes to ‘syndicate’ the content of that feed.