Author Archives: Corey Frang

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Hosting and Configuring the jQuery Servers

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The other day, we posted about our new content workflow, but we didn’t get into how all that content is actually served. Believe it or not, jQuery doesn’t just run on jQuery.

The servers

The servers themselves are hosted at Media Temple. We have been using their VPS services for many years to host all the things we need to host, of which there are a surprising number. We use over a dozen different servers (of various sizes) hosting everything in the jQuery network including many different web sites, applications and services vital to the community and development team. The reliability of the Media Temple VPS services and network for our infrastructure has been fantastic.

The setup

We couldn’t manage all of the servers without Puppet. Puppet is a configuration management tool that makes it really easy to express server configuration in a simple scripting language. Tasks like adding a domain to the Nginx configuration can be annoying, and hard to track changes using conventional methods. Using Puppet lets us store all the server configuration needed in a git repository, and deploy new machines very easily.

Another product that really shines in our setup is Nginx. Nginx is an open source web server focused on delivering the best performance possible. On our busiest Media Temple Dedicated Virtual server around peak times, Nginx handles about 300 HTTP requests per second, of which about 30 are serving pages from WordPress via php-fpm. Nginx’s built in fastcgi_cache handles a lot of that load, and more like 2 or 3 requests per second actually make it to PHP.

Thanks for the support!

Keeping a network of servers running to support a community as large as jQuery’s is a big job. To help ensure everything runs smoothly, we rely on jQuery Infrastructure team members Adam Ulvi and Ryan Neufeld, and for server and network-related issues we count on prompt and helpful support from the Media Temple team.

To celebrate their 7 years of serving the jQuery community, Media Temple is extending a special offer on their VPS and Grid Hosting. For the next 5 days, get 50% off an annual purchase of a Grid or VPS (up to level 3) service with the code LovejQuery50.

Speaking of support, if you need any support with jQuery, or the related web sites and services, check out one of our IRC channels on freenode.

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jQuery Color 2.1.1 Released

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Just a quick announcement: jQuery Color 2.1.1 is now released! This adds a few bug fixes to the 2.1.0 release and I would suggest upgrading as soon as possible to avoid encountering these bugs.

Changelog

  • Ensure white and black both have a saturation of 0 to keep them in greyscale color space.
  • Add support for ‘.25’ instead of ‘0.25’ for alpha string parsing

Download

Thanks!

Special thanks going out to Mike Sherov, Ben Olson, Dmitry, and antoniojrod for helping with this release!

Issues

As always, if you encounter any issues, please do not post replys on this blog post, instead visit jquery-color issues on github.

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jQuery Color 2.1.0

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Early last week I released jQuery Color 2.0.0, the wait for a jQuery Color plugin that gives you an API to work with colors is over.

What’s new in jQuery Color 2.0.0?

jQuery Color has faithfully supported animating colors between two hex values since the beginning. Many developers asked for access to the internal functions we had declared to make it all possible. Version 2 now includes an API to create and modify colors, as well as support for RGBA & HSLA colors and animations.

You can read more about the API and features on the repository readme.

Any issues should be reported on the issue tracker.

Why jQuery Color 2.1.0 already?

It’s every developers dream to land a major version perfectly on the first release, but it is rarely achieved. In the last two weeks a few minor bugs that were left in 2.0.0 have been fixed, and a new function was added to the API which should help support SVG style properties.

Download jQuery Color 2.1.0

You can download the release from our CDN provided by Media Temple.

In order to save on file size, the jQuery Color plugin only supports the Basic color keywords by default, the Extended Color Keywords are included in a separate file. If you want to include both, you can also download the bundled version.

Credits

Thanks go out to Dan Heberden, Scott González, Jörn Zaefferer, Mike Sherov, Brendan Byrd, and Christoffer Sawicki who helped make this release happen.

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jQuery Color v2 Beta 1 Released

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Back in 2007 we released the jQuery Color Plugin, and it has been providing you with color-based animations ever since. We are now preparing a second version of this plugin which adds an API, RGBA, HSLA, and many other features. It is time for a beta! The repository for this plugin can be found at github.com/jquery/jquery-color.  There are also uncompressed and minified versions available on code.jquery.com.

New Feature Overview:

RGBA

We now support RGBA color values. In browsers that don’t support RGBA, the nearest backgroundColor to the element will be used to calculate a “blended” approximation of the color. Although this isn’t “true” alpha, it will at least provide the illusion of alpha when dealing with solid background colors.  This is a screenshot of Opera 10, Chrome 10, Firefox 3.6, and IE 6 all running this demonstration of alpha blending:
Opera 10, Chrome 10, Firefox 3.6, and IE 6 demonstrating alpha blending

HSLA

We also now support using HSLA color values across all browsers, with the execption of alpha, which uses the same techniques described above.

Easy-to-use API

Instead of a simple group of private utility methods, $.Color() now creates a new Color object. The new Color object can be initialized in a few different ways: color names, hexidecimal color codes, css style rgba/hsla, an array of rgba values, or an object with the color properties. There are now helper methods for each color property, like .red() and .hue() that can get or set the particular value. Combined with helper functions like .toRgbString(), .transition() and .is(), $.Color can now handle whatever color needs you might have. Refer to the README on github.com/jquery/jquery-color for an overview of all the new functions available. No longer is jQuery.Color just providing you with animation of simple colors, you can now use its API to do complex color calculations and animations!

Quick Examples:

// Create a red Color object:
var red = $.Color( 'rgba(255,0,0,1)' ); // using a css string

// Create a red Color object, then make orange:
var orange = $.Color( '#FF0000' ).green( 153 );

// Get the color halfway between red and blue:
var between = $.Color([ 255, 0, 0 ]).transition( "blue", 0.5 );

Animating Partial Colors

We have added support for only defining one or two properties of a color object so that you can animate using a partial color like this:

// desaturate the background of this element
elem.animate({
    backgroundColor: $.Color({ saturation: 0 })
}, 1000);

Reporting Problems / Requesting Features:

If you find any problems with the new color plugin, or would like to request a feature, please create a github issue.

Also, we’d love to see and showcase some excellent uses of the new $.Color beta, so please be sure to share it with us in the comments.