A Super-Lightweight jQuery Toast Plugin

Looking for a lightweight toast jQuery plugin?  Here’s a super simple one I wrote for this site, called gtqToast. It minifies to just 520 bytes.

TOAST PLUGIN DEMO

(function($) {
    'use strict';

    var $toastList = $('<ul id="gtqToast"></ul>').appendTo('body');

    //register the plugin
    $.fn.gtqToast = function(options) {

        var settings = $.extend({},
                                {fade:      500,
                                linger:    4000},
                                options),
            $toast = $('<li style="position:absolute;visibility:hidden;"></li>')
                            .appendTo($toastList),
            $container = $('<div></div>')
                            .html(this)
                            .appendTo($toast),
            height = $toast.height();

        $container.hide();
        $toast.css({display: 'none',
                    position: 'static',
                    visibility: 'visible',
                    height: height})
            .slideDown(160, function() {
                $container.fadeIn(settings.fade)
                    .delay(settings.linger)
                    .fadeOut(settings.fade, function() { $toast.remove(); });
            });
    };

    $.gtqToast = function(text, options) {
        $('<span></span>').text(text).gtqToast(options);
    };

})(jQuery);

It needs this bit of CSS as well (note that I assume you use a CSS reset, otherwise you’ll want to add properties like list-style: none):

#gtqToast { position: fixed;
            bottom: 10%;
            z-index: 102;
            text-align: center;
            width: 100%; }
#gtqToast div { display: inline-block;
                background: rgba(0,0,0,0.75);
                color: #fff;
                font-size: 15px;
                font-weight: bold;
                padding: 14px 20px;
                border-radius: 20px;
                box-shadow: 3px 3px 9px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.3);
                margin-top: 8px; }

What the plugin does: inserts an empty ul (unordered list) tag into the DOM with a fixed bottom position 10% up from the bottom of the viewport. This list will hold the toasts. You can trigger a toast in two ways.

// #1, call on a jQuery object
$('<span>This is my toast</span>').gtqToast();

// #2 call with text
$.gtqToast('Another toast, yay!');

These calls will add the toast to our list and fade them in. If you look at the plugin code, I actually add a div inside the li to contain the toast message. Plus you’ll notice some weird CSS changing. I did this to account for multiple toasts becoming visible at the same time. What will happen is, existing toasts will slide upward when a new toast is added, then the new toast will fade in.

There are only two settings you can change on this basic plugin: fade is the fade in/out speed, and linger is the length of time the toast will stay on the screen. The defaults should be fine for most cases.

Feel free to use this if it fits your needs!

Make Rainbow-Colored Lists (and other HTML elements) – jQuery plugin

How to make rainbow-colored lists? I started searching for a solution and found a plugin for rainbow text, which inspired me to write my own jQuery plugin to rainbow-ify lists and other sets of HTML elements.

I’m used to working with RGB hex color codes.  But there is no intuitive way to generate a spectrum of color using RGB, so I turned to HSL (hue, saturation and lightness).  Most modern browsers support colors specified with hsl(hue, saturation%, lightness%), although IE versions prior to 9 do not. So I started out using HSL, adding IE support later. I found that keeping the saturation and lightness constant at 100% and 80% respectively while increasing the hue in steps produces a really nice rainbow effect.

Let’s back up a bit. Consider the following styled list:

I’d like to color this list to look like a rainbow. Using CSS alone is unwieldy; without knowing in advance the number of elements in the list, it’s impossible.  We need to use Javascript to get this result:

Here’s how I did it–my rainbow plugin code (~1KB when minified):

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jQuery Shake Plugin to, er, Make Elements Shake

I wanted to make a submit button shake back and forth when the form input is invalid, signaling the user that there was a problem. Simple enough. So I googled around for an existing solution, but the jquery plugins I found only made elements vibrate like crazy. I wanted a left-right shake.

Well it turned out to be very easy to implement myself.  Minified, my shake jquery plugin is less than 0.5KB.  Here’s a demo page.  Here’s the code:

(function($) {
    'use strict';

    //the plugin call
    $.shake = $.fn.shake = function(options) {
        if (this.length !== 0) {
            //initialize settings & vars
            var settings = $.extend(
                {   distance:   12,
                    iterations: 3,
                    duration:   160,
                    easing:     'swing'},
                options),
                $shakeThis = this;

            return $shakeThis.each(function(i, el) {
                var $el = $(el),
                    marg = ($el.parent().width() / 2) - ($el.outerWidth() / 2);

                $el.css('margin-left', marg);
                for (var j = 0; j < settings.iterations; j++)
                    leftRight($el, marg);

                $el.animate({'margin-left': marg}, settings);
            });
        }

        function leftRight($el, marg) {
            $el.animate({'margin-left': (marg - settings.distance)}, settings)
               .animate({'margin-left': (marg + settings.distance)}, settings);
        }
    };

})(jQuery);

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