This page contains samples of Nick LaPrell's professional and private work. Additional information can be found at the following links:
Plugin Loader - jQuery Plugin Manager
The Plugin Loader is a tool to manage jQuery plugins and dependancies, including supporting stylesheets. It can also handle JavaScript files and libraries. Scripts can be loaded directly from JavaScript in both a parallel or blocking fashion.
ezCookie - jQuery Cookie Plugin
ezCookie was written as a simple library to handle reading and writing cookies. It can stand on its own, though it was built to be used as a jQuery plugin (specifically with the Plugin Loader).
What makes ezCookie unique is that it was originally designed to store name/value pairs in a single cookie (known as "sub-cookies"). The latest update to the plugin introduces the ability to store JSON objects by using JSON.org's JSON2.js library to parse and stringify objects. The sub-cookie functions have been updated to use JSON objects to store the name/value pairs.
Craigslist Job Feed Aggregator
The Craigslist Job Feed Aggregator makes it easy to check Tech and Creative job listings from nearly 40 US cities on a single page. The categories and cities are scalable within the code. Listings are ordered and sectioned off by date. Each listing links to the original listing on Craigslist and has an expandable details section
The feeds are retrieved using AJAX and cached locally on the server to reduce load time. Clicking on "Fetch Current Feeds" link in the control bar retrieves the current listings for each city under the selected category and reloads the listings.
The Advanced Search feature filters the locally cached listings for the current selected category further. Listings can be filtered by date, city, and keywords.
The keyword search routine is capable of filtering listings by required keywords (denoted with a "+"), restricted keywords (denoted with a "-"), and literal searchs. Example: "new page" +coder -designer will return only results that contain "coder", do not contain "designer" and may contain "new page."
The jQuery JavaScript Library was used for all visual effect and to make the AJAX calls.
Animation Factory Purchase Page
This project was a complete redesign of an awkward five page purchase flow on Animation Factory. I updated the purchase page and shopping cart into a single page with an intuitive and interactive layout. jQuery was used extensively for animations and effects. The rest of the site was updated with a floating shopping cart widget. Form validation was also updated to include on-the-fly AJAX validation of the username and VAT Tax ID.
To accommodate existing infrastructure, the cart was converted to a cookie based entity using an early version of the ezCookie plugin I designed. I wrote an additional cart plugin to act as a layer between the UI and the cookie plugin. This plugin manages discount codes as well and normalizes cart products to add or remove discount codes based on the user state.
This design is not yet live, but an interactive demonstration page is available here.
Beta Central
Beta Central is the website used to facilitate public testing of AOL beta software. It was designed with strict UI requirements and color scheme requirement. The site is rendered through two key files using a custom designed HTML rendering class written in PHP. Back-end tools (not available to view) were designed to manage content publishing on the site through file writing (a database was not available). The drag and drop windows (Speak Out > Contact us) were custom built using an open source drag script. Other interface elements use the Dojo Toolkit.