jQuery has been out there for a while now. Many web developers use it thanks to its simplicity. But because you can use it intuitively there is a chance you might overuse it. Because not all browsers out there can easily deal with lots of JavaScript your enhancements might decrease the user experience – definitely the opposite of what you wanted. So how can you avoid it?

Yesterday I published an article with an example on how you can display a random image in SharePoint 2007 using jQuery. With only a couple of lines of JavaScript you can pick a random image from an Image Library and display it on a page. But did you actually know that with a little more effort you can create your own images slideshow?

If you’ve been following my blog you know that a bit more than a year ago I’ve published the Imtech Random Image Web Part: a SharePoint web part which allows you to display random images from a list of your choice. The web part I’ve made contains some code which you would have to deploy it in your SharePoint environment to get it working. Did you actually know that you can create the same functionality using no more than a couple of lines of JavaScript and no server-side code at all?

While working on a new JavaScript mockup I needed a way to obtain a random jQuery item. While I could use jQuery(“selector”).get(int) to get a random item, I wanted to have a cleaner way of doing that to keep my code clean.

SharePoint has a lot of gold under the hood. Unfortunately for us – developers not all of it is publicly available. Some methods/properties are marked as internal what makes it impossible for us to use is custom functionality we’re developing. But do you really develop your own alternatives or is there a way to get to those gems after all?