Book Image

jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide

By : Giulio Bai
Book Image

jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide

By: Giulio Bai

Overview of this book

<p>jQuery is the most famous JavaScript library. If you use jQuery a lot, it can be a good idea to start packaging your code into plugins. A jQuery plugin is simply a way to put your code into a package, which makes it easier to maintain your code and use across different projects. While basic scripting is relatively straightforward, writing plugins can leave people scratching their heads.<br /><br />With this exhaustive guide in hand, you can start building your own plugins in a matter of minutes! This book takes you beyond the basics of jQuery and enables you to take full advantage of jQuery's powerful plugin architecture to deliver highly interactive content to your website viewers.<br /><br />This book contains all the information you need to successfully author your very own jQuery plugin with a particular focus on the practical aspect of design and development. <br /><br />This book will also cover some details of real life plugins and explain their functioning to gain a better understanding of the overall concept of plugin development and jQuery plugin architecture.<br /><br />Different topics regarding plugin development are discussed, and you will learn how to develop many types of add-ons, ranging from media plugins (such as slideshows, video and audio controls, and so on) to various utilities (image pre-loading, handling cookies) and use and applications of jQuery effects and animations (sliding, fading, combined animations) to eventually demonstrate how all of these plugins can be merged and give birth to a new, more complex, and multipurpose script that comes in handy in a lot of situations.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
jQuery 1.4 Plugin Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Generating tag clouds


A tag cloud (or word cloud) is a visual presentation of tags (or words) describing the content of a website or document.

Tags are, usually, single words linking to the associated items (articles, pages, or other links) whose importance is shown with either font size or color (or both). The bigger the size of the word, the more important and utilized the word is.

This tag presentation technique was first used by the popular image hosting service Flickr, and soon social bookmarking websites such as de.licio.us and Technorati picked up this idea too. Other users, particularly bloggers, decided to integrate this functionality into their websites to offer a better user experience and a quicker identification of post and topics of interest.

A bit of theory to start with

We better start off with some theory first, as this plugin requires a bit of reasoning as far as font size is concerned.

There are a few key points we must not overlook, namely:

  1. 1. A maximum font size should be...