Archive for October, 2011
Infinite JQuery Carousel with Clickable Images
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
I just spent a very frustrating day dealing with jQuery carousels. I am working on a project where I needed to have a carousel with images across the top of a page where the images link to external pages.
I found all kinds of great scripts, fitting all kinds of design and functionality needs, but nothing had usable clickable images. I was going crazy. I started with rCarousel first, then realizing that clicking the image wasn’t possible (well, I found one person who made it work, but I couldn’t get their tweak to work). Then I found jCarousel and a tutorial showing how to make the images clickable, but that was totally convoluted and I was starting to get frustrated and frankly, kinda pissed off.
Was I completely off base to think that I should be able to click on the images in the carousel? Really, I don’t think so. If anything, I would think this would be the default functionality, with the ability to turn it off.
Anyway, after taking a step back and putting it away over night (always a good idea when code is frustrating you) I realized I needed to do a little more research. One unfortunate part of how Google indexes content and decides what is important is that good products and companies get buried under the loads of directories, social sites, blogs with link list content and forums. Now, sometimes what I need is right on the first forum or blog and it’s great to get that personalized content. But, sometimes you are looking for an actual product or company that fits your keywords and that can be difficult to find.
So after scouring through several “175 best jQuery carousel and slider plugin” blogs, I finally found this little gem. Thank goodness. Works great and the site is informative and laid out well. They provided examples of all the ways to customize the script.
After all that battling and frustration, it took me five minutes to implement and another twenty to customize the css. Awesome!
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