Brennan’s Blog

If you are using the Rating Control for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit on a long page you will notice that after selecting your rating the page jumps to the top of the screen. On a short page you will not notice anything but the hash sign appearing at the end of the URL. On a long page the jump is a big problem. It is due to the href attribute on the anchor tags being set to a hash instead of something like javascript:void(0); which would prevent the jumping. I fixed this with one line of JavaScript using jQuery to set the link value to ensure clicking does not have the unwanted side-effect.

In the below sample I have the Rating Control wrapped in a div tag with Rating set as the CSS class. This way I can have many ratings on one page and having this one line fix all of them.

$('div.Rating a').attr('href', 'javascript:void(0);');

In the late 90's there were a few developers and designers who were feeling out the web as a new medium. I would read their websites, which were essentially blogs before RSS existed, and they would write very personal entries on all sorts of topics. My very favorite was Maggy. I somehow came across the websites she created and quickly discovered others like Alexis Massie, Lance Arthur, Ben Brown and Derek Powazek. Each of them showed a great ability to develop and design great concept websites as well as write amazing content. The mixture of these talents made for very addictive websites.

One website that Powazek created was Kvetch.com which is no longer active. He wrote that when he moved his websites from one server to another he did not restore the Kvetch.com website. That is unfortunate. It was a brilliant idea. Essentially you could select from a handful of topics and then view a series of complaints about that topic. You could also post a complaint anonymously. (Note: Kvetch is a Yiddish word for complain.)

This week I wanted to get some exposure to various features in Visual Studio 2008 which was released recently so I thought this would be the perfect time bring the Kvetch.com concept back. When I built it originally he used inline frames while I am using AJAX as well as some nice effects with jQuery. In another post I will cover the details on how it was built. I have refactored down the AJAX work so that it is very easy to create AJAX-friendly user control with complex, yet uniquely contained, behavior.

I look forward to reading your comments.

[ Kvetch Reborn ]

Also, I hope to see you at the installfest tonight. I may give a short demo of the LINQ and JavaScript that I created for this website.