Last week I had the extreme pleasure of being the subject of an interview given by the esteemed Eric Meyer and presented by An Event Apart.

This turn of events was so abnormal to my existence that I repeatedly pinched myself to ascertain that I was in fact, still alive. It was, in a word, freaking amazing, and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity. For a guy that I’ve compared to a Romulan, planned to abduct, and confused with Rupert Gint, Eric Meyer seemed to be all too friendly to yours truly. Suspiciously so. You might find the fact that he’d choose to interview me at all quite an odd choice.

I’d agree, but then, maybe it wasn’t so innocent as that. Maybe, as today’s comic implies, it was a kung fu death trap.

Ok, ok. It wasn’t. There were no wuxia battles or bicycle kicks. It was simply awesome.

I’m sure if you visit my website you’re in one of three camps: Either you thought you were learning about squirrels (sorry), you’re my parents (hi!) or you’re already into web design. If you’re in the latter group, you probably have already heard of An Event Apart. If you haven’t, go check it out. Not only is it an awesome two-day conference about standards-based design (which is so important in our ever-growing modern web), it’s a social network of good men and women who are obsessed with the same geeky stuff you are.

Which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty dang cool.

Time to expose some of my JavaScript weaknesses.

I’m working on a side-project that has multiple instances of the same object (or the equivalent in JS) that makes use of jQuery’s .animate function. At the end of the animate function I want to use .animate‘s callback function option to loop the function in each object (allowing each to loop through a frame-by-frame animation of its own, for example).

The problem is I’m running into an obstacle, which can be illustrated by this simplified looping example. In this particular case, when you click on the button, it creates an instance of the object, sets a value inside it, then calls an internal function which displays an alert box, then calls a (in this case pointless) jQuery .animate function which contains a callback function to loop the instance’s function. The idea would be that I can call multiple instances of the object, and have each assigned their own values and then they’ll loop happily on their own.

That’s not happening, of course.

If you examine the JS source code (linked here) you’ll see that I use function(){this:greet();} as my callback parameter. My understanding was that this would correctly relaunch the function of the instance. It does not, however, work as I desire (aka, at all).

I know that this is an odd thing, so I’m sure I’m hamfistedly trying to pound a square peg in a round hole. The trouble is that I have absolutely no clue what the round peg is.

What I really need is a Master Po to tell me where I’m going horribly wrong here. Can anyone be my blind kung fu mentor?