I've been really getting into learning Javascript and the jQuery library. I just started working with Javascript in earnest about a year ago, and started working with jQuery about six or eight months ago.

As I get more into working with Javascript and jQuery, I find that I enjoy it more and more, and actually get excited about new puzzles to solve. I love designing cool things to sate my creative side, while solving the puzzles of the coding side sates my analytical side. I've also really been eager to develop my first actual plug-in.

I'd been working on a project at work all day on Friday, and was really in a serious jQuery mode. I was thinking about how excellent libraries like jQuery, along with the incredible advances in the major browsers and their improved support for Javascript over the years, have really made it possible to do things in straight-up XHTML/CSS/JS now that you couldn't do without using Flash a few years ago.

And that's when I remembered ZoomQuilt.

A few years back, the SciFi Channel made a new version of The Wizard of Oz called Tin man (it was ok, I guess), and I went to check out their website, and saw a really cool thing they called infinite oz. I did a bit of snooping into the code, and found out that they had based it on another project called ZoomQuilt and it's follow-up, ZoomQuilt-II.

Now, it seems that I was actually a bit behind the times, and that the ZoomQuilt projects had been around for several years, and had already made the rounds, so to speak, during that first era of the web, where everyone sent their friends spam all day long with the next cool thing they'd found. Apparently, my friends either never found this one, or I never opened that email. Either way, I was several years behind the times before I finally discovered the ZoomQuilt projects.

They'd had their time in the spotlight. That time had come and gone.

Well, I saved those two bookmarks, and forgot about them ... till this past weekend.

So, as I was trying to think of something I'd seen in Flash that could now be replicated without Flash, I suddenly remembered the ZoomQuilt projects. I decided to recreate the functionality of the Flash code, but with XHTML/CSS/JS while utulizing the jQuery library for most of the scripting. I only did the 'player', not the artwork.

All of the artwork on these examples is from the original ZoomQuilt and ZoomQuilt-II projects, and all credit for their artwork goes to the artists from those two projects. Please visit their sites to learn more about the artists and the way the graphics were produced. Please also check out the work of the creator of the original Flash coding that inspired the jQuery one.

While I didn't do any of this example's artwork, I would, however, love to start my own ZoomQuilt project, and get a group of artists together to build another set of slides to play in a ZoomQuilt player.

This is just the first version of the jZoomQuilt. I'm calling this version 0.0.1(alpha). I'm not actually releasing it yet, albeit the savvy coder could easily get to it, just 'cuz it isn't quite ready for prime-time. It still has a lot of functions to be added and tweaks to be made. But hey, this is my first plug-in, and maybe my 2nd or 3rd pseudo-complicated project, so give it time. Also, if you look deep into the code and thing I'm not doing things the best way, or could be doing things differently to make my code or the browser more efficient, please feel free to let me know. I'm always open to suggestion.