Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery: Part 2

This is the second part of a two-part series that will help you build a complex sliding menu, enhanced with modal windows. Click here to read Part 1 of Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery

This second part will cover building a modal window and coding its behavior. If you don’t know what I already explained, please go back to the first article here and come back once you finish that one. However, if XHTML, CSS and jQuery are your friends, you may pick things up as we go, so just go ahead and read this part of the tutorial.

Let me remind you the concept we described in the previous article. We have a horizontal menu with a few categories. Each category has multiple subcategories and each such subcategory may contain a random number of products. For easier and faster movement of users thorough the site, we won’t reload the page once a subcategory is clicked. Instead, we will display all products in a modal window.

Here’s a screenshot of the menu and one simple modal window.

How does the modal work?

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7 Deadly Sins of Blogging

Guest blogger Jimi Olaghere is a young business owner who runs Broke Tycoon, a blog and forum with advice for business and marketing techniques.

Seems like everyone is a blogger these days, publishing articles on personal or freelance business blogs, updating statuses on twitter – even commenting on previously written articles. Face it, we’re blogging. But how can we stand out in a sea of keyboard happy drones? Repent from these sins and maybe the blog Gods will forgive you.

1. Pride
You can’t do it on your own, or maybe you can; don’t get me wrong, self belief is a good thing. But when you are starting a blog, one of the fastest ways to increase traffic is to partner up with other bloggers. Link exchange, link backs, shared links, they all work; find one that’s compatible with your niche then blog happy.

2. Envy
All blogs are not created equal, there is never going to be another gossip blog like Perez Hilton’s. Many have tried, but it’s still not the same. The faster you realize that you can’t imitate other successful blogs, the sooner your blog will become successful. So go out there and do your own thing, in fact look at what everyone is doing and do the exact opposite; you’ll be surprised with the results.
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Blogging for Cash

A new trend in American employment now is blogging part-time or full-time to make money. Many people have taken up blogging only to find themselves not only having lots of fun, but making more money than they did on their nine to five job. So they quit and just blog full time. It’s a real phenomenon.

There are a few ways that bloggers make money:

(1). The most common way for bloggers to make money is through ads. When blogging first started, Adsense and Blogads were the way to create income. But since that time loads of other ways have emerged. Some of these are Chitika’s eMinimalls, Adbrite, Adgena, AVN, and many more.

(2). Sponsorships are another way to earn money with your blog. Once a few bloggers and a few companies figured out how lucrative this could be for both sides, it was on from there. They found it was an excellent way to advertise and to sell.
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TaskCity: Marketplace to Match Freelancers with Employers

As we all know, one of the toughest challenges for freelancers is to consistently find new projects and sources of revenue.   Marketing your services and finding projects is a major key to long-term success for any independent freelancer. Luckily for us, a number of project-matching web services have launched in the last few years, including TaskCity.com. These services are immensely helpful tools built specifically for freelance business development.

I took a look at TaskCity, one of the newer platforms for matching professional freelancers with outsourced projects.  This free market for freelancers and employer services is focused squarely on the following categories of work:

• Web Development
• Software Development
• Networking & Information Systems
• Graphic Arts & Design

I didn’t really find any projects related to writing, marketing or administrative services, so please note that this platform is not suited to every type of freelancer at this point in time. From browsing the site, the greatest number of existing project listings appear to be technical in nature.
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Product Review: GTime Tracking for Freelancers

There are quite a few tools out there to help freelancers manage project hours and billing, and today we look at one of the effective, low-cost solutions. I tried out GTime Tracking this past week, which is a simple, yet elegant software that runs on Adobe AIR and stores your timed-task information with Google Spreadsheets.

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Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery: Part 1

Do you need to build a navigation interface that has to handle hundreds of product links? All grouped in categories, subcategories? Perhaps even containing thumbnails? If the answer is yes, here’s a usability path to avoid :

1. select categories, wait for a page to load
2. select a subcategory, wait for another page to load
3. check out products
4. click to go to desired product

The typical web user only wants to click once or twice to get to the product they want. And if clicks are unavoidable, make sure page loads are minimized! The more clicks and the more page loading they have to go through, the higher the risk they will get lost and never come back to your site. The good news is that you can achieve a good navigation menu that reduces page reloads.

This article is an in-depth tutorial on how you can achieve an expandable navigation menu using valid xhtml coding, valid css and a bit of javascript.
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Excel Password Recovery

I’ve been freelancing now for two years, and I love the benefits of being able to work from home and have a certain level of independence. Sometimes that individuality comes with a price, as I found out this past week – no in-house IT support!

While compiling a proposal for internet marketing consulting, I knew I had a couple excel reports from a previous job that could be repurposed for this project. Unfortunately, I hadn’t opened the documents in a couple years and couldn’t remember or find the password. Obviously, contacting my previous company for the key was not an option.

Maybe Microsoft can offer an online service to securely store user passwords for documents? I’d love the ability to submit a “forgot password” request and receive a new one via email, much like every online login service in the industry. Oh well, until then we have to use utilities and cracks to access our forgotten files.

I ended up finding a good solution with step-by-step details and a free download for excel password recovery at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Their guide simply shows you how to use the utility’s two available options for recovery, and didn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. Give it a try if you ever find yourself in a similar (embarrassing) predicament as mine.