On this day in 2006, I wrote and published a short post here about something that had eluded my attempts at searching for an answer. I thought that archiving the information online might help if I needed to find it again later, and that it might help anyone else who had been similarly unable to track down the answer.

Three years later, the site has served over one million page views to JavaScript enabled browsers in the last year alone, and thousands of you keep tabs on the site’s updates through RSS, email, and/or Twitter.

One step at a time, it’s astonishing just how far this thing has come.


Best of 2009

Of the posts published since this time last year, these are the ones that have been viewed the most, starting with the most popular:

$(document).ready() and pageLoad() are not the same – The inclusion of LiveQuery in jQuery 1.3 makes pageLoad necessary less often, but it is still useful at times. Understanding when and where that makes sense is crucial when initializing jQuery functionality on content within UpdatePanels.

Automatically minify and combine JavaScript in Visual Studio – I was never very happy with the various minification workflows I had tried before this. Combination was even worse. Finding this hybrid between the tedious configuration of build tasks and the waste of manual minification removed almost all the friction involved.

11 keystrokes that made my jQuery selector run 10x faster – This was probably the most self-educational post I wrote this year. Though the title may have been over-sensationalized, I hope all of the objective, cross-browser testing made it worth reading.

Simplify calling ASP.NET AJAX services from jQuery – This post represents the culmination of what went into at least three others before it (1, 2, 3). Though the end result would have been easy enough to publish for copy/pasting, I hope it was useful for me to “show my work” in the interim iterations.

Using complex types to make calling services less… complex – I’m happy to see this post in the top five, even though it’s more narrowly focused. I think it’s an important one for those of us using jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX services in non-trivial scenarios. In fact, someone described the approach in this post to me a few days ago as a “huge paradigm shift!”, which pretty well describes the impact it had in my own work.

Thank you

The past year has been a bit surreal for me, to say the least.

Since this time last year, I’ve joined with great co-authors on the second edition of a book that I was already a fan of, joined the ASPInsiders, received the ASP.NET MVP award, have had the opportunity to work with Craig Shoemaker and the guys at TekPub on branching out to different mediums, and have even more projects in the works that I can’t announce yet.

I could not have done it without you. Without your participation, promotion, and support over the past three years, none of the previous would have been possible at all; not by a long shot.

For all of the above, I am sincerely, profoundly grateful.

I hope that you enjoy a safe, happy holiday, and that we all have a great 2010 coming up. With Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, and jQuery 1.4 coming in the first few months alone, it’s sure to be an interesting year!