Today I released jQuery Autosave a new plugin for jQuery that tracks the state of a form and fires of events to save the form data when the form has been dirtied. I use this plugin for my content management system to save changes to the user's content while they are working. I'm very interested in feedback, so please take a look and let me know what you think. The release package includes an example that demonstrates usage and how this plugin works. You can find the plugin as well as more information over at my project page.

jGrowl 1.2.4 has been release and is now available for download here. This release is primarily to fix some compatibility issues with Internet Explorer. As always, if you find any bugs or have any suggestions please contact me

I've recently release two updates to jGrowl, the most recent of which is version 1.2.3. If you are a regular jGrowl user I suggest updating to this version as it contains some important fixes when using multiple containers. Callback support has been enhanced and improved to be more robust and jQuery UI theming by way of ThemeRoller is also supported. I owe a special thanks to the community which greatly contributed to this most recent patch release - thanks!

You can find the latest version of jGrowl here.

jGrowl 1.2.1 has been released. You can find the changes here and download the release here.

I released jGrowl 1.2.0 the other day over on the jQuery plugin page. It's basically the same as the last beta, with just some minor tweaks and improvements. The big change in 1.2.0 is a queue for notifications to prevent the screen from filling up with notifications and posting them outside of the user's scope of view. More info is available here.

I've gotten a couple of e-mails asking if jGrowl was compatible with the newly released jQuery 1.3. To the best of my knowledge jGrowl is fully compatible and there are no know regressions. I would recommend using the latest 1.3.2 release of jQuery though, albeit there are no known issues the items fixed since the initial 1.3 release are worth having and could possibly effect overall behavior.

I've just release jGrowl 1.2.0beta3 over at the jQuery plugin page. This release includes some minor changes based on user feedback to the way that a notification is closed. Currently the triggers occur by the little "x" close button or by way of time elapsed or by way of the "close all" button. While it's possible to introduce your own trigger for closing a notification (for example, click anywhere on the node), it's not as easy to implement. Subsequently, the closing off a notification has been moved such that at any time you can call, jQuery("div.jGrowl").trigger("jGrowl.close); and the close operation will be initiated.

You can download this release here.

Dates and timestamps and things of this sort have often been the bane of my existence when working with javascript. For whatever reason javascript never came out-of-the-box with handy dandy date utilities to make working with those types of variables painless. I'm slightly spoiled, because in PHP you can do just about anything with strtotime() and the formatting options of date(). PHP 5 tossed in the DateTime object and then things became really fun. Likewise, when I work in the world of Java there is SimpleDateFormat and the far superior Joda. Most of the time I just let these things do the grunt work when it comes to dates and I let Javascript feed off of their superiority.

Today I stumbled into Datejs, which is a Javascript library that takes from the best elements of the Java and PHP world, mixes them together and tacks on some excellent jQuery-style chaining to make what is by far the best date solution for Javascript I have seen to date. There are formatting features for outputting dates, conversion features for reading in dates, modification and comparison methods and best of all a series of chainable function to build dates, ie. Date.today().next().thursday();. How cool is that?!? I'm bundled this into just about everything I do, if I include jQuery or some other primary library into a project I expect to be tucking this in with it. Too often am I stuck with a date conundrum, so it's better to have this utility around.

Bottom line, if you're doing javascript work of any kind and haven't already found this gem - go download it now().

A new beta of jGrowl 1.2.0 has been uploaded on the jQuery plugin page. This latest beta fixes several syntax errors if you went to compress the library or obfuscate it, as well as fixes a major bug in the log callback. That error would have occurred in the event that a custom option object did not define a log callback. If you run into any issues or have any suggestion please feel free to send them to me. Otherwise, you can download this release here.

I've released two new versions of jGrowl this evening, the first is 1.1.2 and includes minor changes to 1.1.1. Nothing serious or exciting there. The other release is an initial beta of 1.2.0 which offers pooling capabilities. What I've noticed is that sometimes too many messages get sent to jGrowl at a given time and messages which are the bottom of a listing can expire before they ever come into view by the user. This really defeats the purpose and functionality, so I've been trying to figure out how to avoid this problem. Messages are pooled into a queue and will only be rendered in the event that the pool has now reached its pooling size. By default this functionality is turned off, however I've included an example file that enables this functionality and sets the pool size to 5 messages. For those who use jGrowl and have run into this issue I highly recommend trying out the 1.2 beta. I haven't decided if anything else is going into 1.2 yet, so you may be looking at a final release... who knows, only time will tell! :) Anyhow, feel free to provide me with feedback on this recent change. You can find these releases on the jQuery plugin page here.