Brian Harke Ed.D.

Dean of Students, USC School of Cinematic Arts

In the coming weeks, many college freshmen will be beginning their college careers. Freshmen Welcome Weeks will be in full swing as colleges and universities help incoming students make a successful transition from high school to college. But what about you, their parents? What kind of programs are designed to help you make the transition?

Find the full article here! 

College Parents of America

http://www.collegeparents.org 

If there were absolute, no fail secrets to college success that worked for every student, every student would know them and follow them and be successful.  The reality is that there are no sure-fire secrets that work for every student.  Each student is an individual with unique strengths and weaknesses, coming from a unique background and placed in a unique situation.

However, there are some tried and true tips that help most students.  We’d like to offer our three favorite tips.  We hope you’ll pass them on to your college student. 

Check out the full article here! 

5 Benefits of an Empty Nest

You Might Be Gaining More Than You First Realize

By Kelci Lucier, CPH Co-Founder

Goodness gracious, it somehow — and finally — happened: You have an empty nest, that mythical thing people seem to describe in magazines and conversations over coffee. Your heart may be feeling a little empty, too, of course. So how can you look at the bright side and see the positives in your new situation? 

Get the full article here! 

Read more about Talmo's research by clicking the link below...

When it comes to styling webpages, nothing’s as tricky as forms. And when it comes to styling forms — almost — nothing’s as tricky as the <select> input.

We can style a <select> with CSS, but there are big limitations on how much we can achieve with CSS alone. Often, the only viable option is styling via JavaScript, and as a form of progressive enhancement it’s not something we need to shy away from.

In this article we’ll be using DropKick to create out dropdown. What dropkick does is transform the <select> list into a fully customizable HTML dropdown and when one option is selected the corresponding select value will be updates as part of your form. OK, let’s get started then…

Setting up our <select>

The first thing we need to do is set up a <select>, we’ll create one for the business days in the week:

<select id='mySelect'>
    <option value='mon'>Monday</option>
    <option value='tue'>Tuesday</option>
    <option value='wed'>Wednesday</option>
    <option value='thu'>Thursday</option>
    <option value='fri'>Friday</option>
</select>

Calling DropKick

Once we’ve set up our <select> we need to load three files into our document: the JavaScript DropKick file, the CSS, and of course jQuery. We should load the CSS in the head and JavaScripts at the foot of the page. With that done, all we need to do to activate the plugin and create our fully customizable dropdowns is to call DropKick, like so:

$('#mySelect').dropkick();

By doing so we transform our HTML into this:

<div class="dk_container dk_theme_default" id="dk_container_undefined">
 <a class="dk_toggle">
 <span class="dk_label">Thursday</span>
 </a>
 <div class="dk_options">
 <ul class="dk_options_inner">
 <li class="">
 <a data-dk-dropdown-value="mon">Monday</a>
 </li>
 <li class="">
 <a data-dk-dropdown-value="tue">Tuesday</a>
 </li>
 <li class="">
 <a data-dk-dropdown-value="wed">Wednesday</a>
 </li>
 <li class="dk_option_current">
 <a data-dk-dropdown-value="thu">Thursday</a>
 </li>
 <li class="">
 <a data-dk-dropdown-value="fri">Friday</a>
 </li>
 </ul>
 </div>
</div>

As you can see, DropKick has transformed our <select> into something we can be confident of styling with CSS. Furthermore, our values have been inserted in the new HTML5 data attributes (with the name data-dk-dropdown-value).

We can now style our dropdown with CSS, or use one the DropKick’s themes if we prefer; at the time of writing there are three themes available, the default, dark gloss and light gloss. But most people will want to use their own styles that match their project’s needs.

Extending DropKick

Extending DropKick is a simple process. For example, if we wanted to detect when a change is made to the dropdown, we can add the change event handler, like so:

$('select').dropkick({
    change: function (value) {
        console.log('Option selected: ' + value);
    }
});

Final thoughts

I’m sure there are a thousand ways to style a select menu without the use of jQuery, but the ones that use just CSS are fighting a losing battle against the browser’s defaults. The simplicity of this plugin and the tremendous flexibility it offers and the progressive enhancement approach that it takes means DropKick is an excellent solution.

Have you used DropKick in a project? Do you have a preferred method of styling <select>s? Let us know in the comments.

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