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jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. Here’s 4 superb jQuery plugins for your web design. Write less, do more!

jQuery Plugin: rf.Sparks

This month’s jQuery plugin is one that creates an effect that I like to describe as “sparks”. We are currently using it on the Redflex splash page whilst we prepare for a new product launch.
From a code point of view it is a reasonably simple effect to produce, all we are doing is creating a whole bunch of div’s with an image inside them, and then move them about a bit.
The plugin is very versatile, you can create as many instances with as many images and/or speeds as you want. Please note: with large numbers of sparks you may notice a significant performance hit.

jQuery Dropdown Search Panel

For one of my projects recently I was playing about with search boxes and came up with a cool drop down search panel. So I thought I would share with you how I made the panel using some jQuery and CSS sprites.

Use jQuery to “turn off the lights” while watching videos

Some videos on YouTube have a cool feature called “Turn the lights down”. Basically, when you turn lights down, the entire page darkens and let you watch video as if you are in the cinema. This tutorial will show you how to implement this simple effect.

Make an Animated Alphabet using Keypress Events in jQuery

By the end of this tutorial we’ll have 26 individual letter blocks which will each react to a corresponding key press. For simplicity sake this demonstration will only support lower case letters and the space bar as input.