The Hanky

When Matt and I started to mumble about this site, this company, and this collective over our plates of al pastor burritos, the economic climes were a bit…er… more “robust”, as the pin-stripe class may say. In an increasingly diversifying market that asks for advertising and content of ever-more-niche markets, we thought there was a seam we could take advantage of, since we’re fairly young and cool and we know how to silkscreen and code and we own cool sneakers. And then, as we all know now, The Biggest Downer of A Dinner Conversation Evar happened in September of this year, and every day since, the prospects look a little grimmer.

It all started late one night, as my eyes started to droop and the letters on my laptop screen began to run together; I had run into a third straight job requiring a number of trivial Javascript effects that had to degrade gracefully, and as I agonized over the dry arcana that Google had spat out at me, I came across the excellent jQuery for Designers Tutorial by Mark Panay. (You should read it if you’re looking for a great primer for this holiest of JS libraries.) I’ve read a lot of insight into Javascript techniques and libraries in particular, but Mark has a really good point, and touches upon the reason I love jQuery: I’m using Javascript because jQuery tricked me into it.