Articles By: Louis Lazaris

I don’t consider myself an application developer. I think I have some knowledge of application design principles, but it’s something I’d like to improve on, especially in the area of JavaScript and Ajax-driven applications.

One technique that I believe is quite helpful when developing high-powered JavaScript apps is the JavaScript try-catch statement (also referred to as try-catch-finally). I became familiar with try-catch sometime last year, and although I haven’t used it much, I found it could prove useful in a number of circumstances.

In this article, I’m going to describe what try-catch is, how it can be used, and how it can help make web applications less annoying to users.

Not too long ago I wrote an article for Six Revisions called Getting Started with jQuery that covered some important things (concept-wise) that beginning jQuery developers should know. This article is the complete opposite; there’s no concepts, no principles, and very little lecturing — just some straight example code with brief descriptions demonstrating what you can do with jQuery.

This fast-paced tutorial should be able to get beginners up and running with jQuery very quickly, while also providing a good overview of what jQuery is capable of (although jQuery’s capabilities go far beyond this beginning tutorial).

Keep in mind that this tutorial is just a bunch of straightforward, superficial code examples and very brief explanations for beginners who want to avoid all the jargon and complexities. But I still highly recommend that all beginners get past this stuff by means of a good book, some more in-depth tutorials online, or by using the jQuery documentation.

It’s common nowadays for bloggers to monetize their blogs through the use of strategically-placed ad blocks. BuySellAds ad blocks are the most popular in the web design community. You’ll sometimes also see AdSense ads placed at the top of articles or in other spots.

It becomes a bit of a challenge, however, to include ads in older posts. Nobody wants to go through and edit each post, adding customized code manually, which could be quite time consuming.

The best way to do this is to put the ad code in your single.php page, outside of the function that displays the post. Unfortunately, with this method, the ads are limited in location to either the top or bottom of the article. In this tutorial, I’m going to describe some JavaScript that I wrote that will dynamically embed a custom ad block between paragraphs in all your WordPress posts.