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Setting up jQuery

Oh, the pain of trying to implement a pre-made script from the internet when you don’t understand how it works! I used to go through this all the time –  I’d find someone’s plugin for a sweet jQuery carousel or lightbox or hover effect, but I didn’t understand enough code to figure out what I was doing wrong, and get it working. I didn’t even really get the basics – where does the call for the script go? Do I put all the jQuery right in my markup? Does it go in the header or the footer? And of course, WHY WON”T THIS WORK?!

If you’ve ever experienced this bang-your-head-against-a-wall frustration, I hope I can fill in some of the blanks for you. This  post is intended for beginners, who want to understand the basics of how to set up their (or anyone else’s) scripts. It assumes you are familiar with HTML, CSS, classes and ids.

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Cross Post: Ain’t No Shame in Quitting.

I wanted to link to this post  that I recently wrote about quitting, for the Edmontonian Media Co. website that Jeff and I share. Having worked in agile for about a year and a half, I’m finally learning that half the value in most projects, web or otherwise, comes from seeing what didn’t work.

But! There is also much value in seeing what you were able to accomplish, even if you didn’t cross the finish line. Case in point, I built a Rails app that actually does stuff. It doesn’t do it well, and it isn’t scalable, DRY, or even very attractive, but I made it, by myself, and I learned a whole bunch from it. Just because it doesn’t meet the goal I set for it in my ambitious brain doesn’t mean it was a failure. I’d rather just call it Success Lite.