I’m currently working on a new website for a client – Trenton1784.org. A lot of what I would like to do requires JQuery. I would like to make it much more “interactive”. For instance, on the main page there is the vignette. Each day a photo with description will be displayed on the main page. There could be about 55 vignettes total.Â
The client would like to be able to show the user past vignettes, and I had initially just thought about the simple “view others” and have them be directed to another page that lists all the previously displayed vignettes. Now I am thinking about possibly trying to incorporate a “Photo Scroller” type mechanism that allows the visitor to cycle through them right from the home page. I’ve never used JQuery and I just got my books in yesterday – but the only way to learn something is to do it. I’m trying to jump right in and learn to swim as quickly as possible here.
I may have to start out a little more manageable though and wade in with JQuery and that would be to still use the “redirect to new page” idea, but then allow them to just simply mouse over the thumbnail of the image to have it expand into the full image.
The other thing is that some vignette description text may be long, but they don’t want it all appearing on the home page. I want to do a “view more” type functionality that expands the text out on demand. What I wanted to do was allow for 3 lines of displayed text and then the “view more” underneath if not all of it was displayed – similar to the facebook way of doing it. Most samples I saw though involve <P> breaks within the text and TWO blocks - which won’t work for what I am trying to do. I did see one sample that I may use or try to modify – that works for the most part the way I want it to. The only problem is that it puts in a <p> element at the break point. I suppose I could dynamically remove this element when the person clicks on “view more” – that way the text continues to flow properly. Like I said – I’ve never used JQuery before, so this will definitely be a learning experience.
If anyone has any thoughts, let me know.