Oikofugic Design

AJAX

August 5th, 2007

Asynchronous Javascript And XML

I at this time know nothing, and am following a tutorial I found whilst looking for a tutorial on AJAX.

From Tizag I begin this latest endeavor.

I love learning new stuff, in fact it is why I am here but the jargon does tend to lead me down a road, which inevitably takes me away from my original pursuit.

Asynchronous, What the..

1 : not synchronous
2 : of, used in, or being digital communication (as between computers) in which there is no timing requirement for transmission and in which the start of each character is individually signaled by the transmitting device.

Here is the finished page. A nice tutorial I think.
It’s funny how your understanding shifts through time. A couple of years ago I thought that my web development and understanding was almost complete because I was learning css. I had reasonable layout and graphic design skills, and was all set to bring the money home producing web sites for local businesses etc. How wrong, I began to see the emergence of the dynamic site. Sites that allowed visitor feedback, and interaction. I wanted some of that action, but initially didn’t understand how it was accomplished. Some time later I discovered the blogging platform wordpress which runs this site.

I am telling you this because I find myself again wondering how best to achieve what I did manually with my first site central12, that is to have unique meta information for individual pages (the static wordpress page, such as ‘about’ or ‘contact’ and the post pages generated when a single post is created.)

Apart from the search engine optimization reason for doing this, I also wanted to unclutter my pages.

This only became desirable after doing the above tutorial, and having the working example on a separate page as opposed to working within the page as in the example on tizag. It is is possible to link to the javascript and php files in the header of the page, but causes the crux of the problem.

Because wordpress pulls content for pages from a template.

header
index
sidebar
footer

Any code that is added to the header will appear on every generated page. Creating individual templates for every new project kind of defeats the object of an auto generated site. So I need a plugin, or a solution that will allow me to have unique meta information on individual pages (static and dynamic) this way I can add link to javascript, php files and have key words in the page header that are specific to that particular page. So this is next on my to do list.

Anyway, back to the subject in hand, which is this AJAX tutorial, and why I am doing it. The truth is I’m not 100% sure. Recently I have heard, and am beginning to understand that the use of AJAX in your code allows communication with the server without the page having to re-load. This is always desirable, not only is the end product smoother for the site user, but site will also be faster.

Really though, the main reason in this pursuit is just to add another facet to my programming/web designing skills. I am not even sure how integrating AJAX into my coding will benefit me at this time, however I am open to change, whilst simultaneously building my knowledge base.
I will write more on the subject as I complete more tutorials.

Update

Check out these plugings I found here, for adding meta information, and custom headers.

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