If you’ve been programming in PHP, or other object oriented languages, you may have come across “this” or “self”. With jQuery, we can write $(this) to select an element in the DOM (Document Object Model). In this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate how and why $(this) is useful. To do this, we’ll be writing a simple image rollover script.

This is part 2 of the “jQuery From Scratch” series of tutorials. If you have not read part 1, you can have a quick read. This tutorial will deal with writing and executing functions in JavaScript. jQuery does not provide a quick method for creating functions. That’s because it doesn’t need to. So what are functions? Instead of giving you the standard definition, I’ll explain why/when you might want to create and use functions in your code. Of course, I’ll also explain how to write and execute functions.

Unordered lists have a number of useful applications. They are commonly used to structure a site’s navigation. I have found, in a number of web applications, that the ability to reorder (sort) such lists would be extremely useful. So, how can this be achieved?

Sortable Widgets is a plugin for Woardpress. When activated, this simple plugin allows visitors to change the order of those widgets displayed in your blog’s sidebar. As this plugin has a number of configurable options, you should be able to use Sortable Widgets with almost any Wordpress theme. Furthermore, each visitor’s preferences are remembered through the use of a single cookie.