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Welcome to Haley Star!

Hey it's Holly here, also known in the web world as  Haley Star.  Why Haley Star?  Well at some point when registering for some site somewhere out there, all the holly names were gone so I chose one close, Haley.  I've also always liked that name, if I ever have a daughter I'll probably name her Haley.  The Star part is because I LOVE stars, I'd put them on everything if I could!  My favorite shape I guess, is that even a
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Jquery Accordion menu with active states

View The Demo

I was recently given the task of creating an accordion type menu that would also have active states to allow for a changing icon based on what menu item you clicked on. I did some research and found there was in fact a Jquery accordion menu plugin. However, this tutorial doesn't use any plugins or extra "stuff". Just your standard Jquery.js file is all you need. If you're working on a Drupal6.x site you don't even need to worry about that as Drupal comes with Jquery now! :)

So let's get started! This is a pretty simple build all things considered! You achieve really great looking results with just a few lines of code. To prove it, here's our code: (this would be placed before the

</head> tag of an html file)
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://jquery.com/src/jquery.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
$("ul li ul.options").hide();
$("ul.options:not(:first)").hide();
$("a.click").click(function(){
$("ul li.menu-item").removeClass("active");
$(this).parent().addClass("active");
$("ul li.menu-item ul.options").slideUp("slow");
$(this).parent().children().slideDown("slow");
return false;
});
});
</script> <style type="text/css">
Not too shabby eh? Now take a look at the results.

To get this working really all you need to do is set up your list correctly. For our example we using a nested list. Looks like this:

<ul>
<li class="menu-item"><a class="click" href="/">Menu Item 1</a>
<ul class="options">
<li>option 1</li>
<li>option 2 is cool</li>
<li>option 3</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li class="menu-item"><a class="click" href="/">Menu Item 2</a>
<ul class="options">
<li>option 1</li>
<li>option 2</li>
<li>option 3 is da bomb</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li class="menu-item"><a class="click" href="/">Menu Item 3</a>
<ul class="options">
<li>option 1 isn't this fun!?</li>
<li>option 2</li>
<li>option 3</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
The big thing to remember here is that you need a way to distinguish your parent lists from your child lists. So here we're using classes. The parent li items have a class of "menu-item" and the child ul's have a class of "options". You'll also want to distinguish between the links that are your parent menu items and if you have any links in your child lists.

This example isn't using links in the child lists but I went ahead and gave the parent links a class of "click" anyway. You can make your class names whatever you want, just be sure to change the jquery code to reflect your own class names or id's.

Once you get that working the rest is just CSS! Take a look at the Source Code of the Demo Page to see exactly what I did to get mine working and looking the way it does. Let me know if you have questions or comments!!!

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Hosting Drupal with HostGator

A month or so ago I announced that I was looking for a new host for my Drupal based websites.  I had foolishly signed up for DrupalValueHosting a while back when I was still a n00b and was coming to the point where I couldn't stand them anymore.  I won't go into ALL the reasons why I left, but basically they suck.

So I started on my journey of looking for a new host that would be able to handle a Drupal based website.  There were a few options I was looking at: Bluehost, Hostmonster, GoDaddy and Hostgator.  I googled all of these hosting providers with the term Drupal in my search query and read tons of reviews trying to pick the best one. 

In the end I got tired of researching and second guessing myserf (very indecisive person) and decided just to give HostGator a try.  They're based out of texas and 100% green!  As in, they generate all their electricity from Wind Power!  How cool is that!?  Good prices too and they seemed to be able to offer all the things I would need.

So I registered and signed up.  The account was ready to go right away with easy to find information about how to access my account, cpanel and dns information so I could transfer domains over.

The next moring I transferred this blog from sucky DrupalValueHosting to HostGator and it was up and running very quickly!  The process was super smooth and I never needed to call customer support for anything!  All the information  you need is given to you in an easy-to-find super user-friendly way.

So it's been a few months and I have absolutely no complaints!  I now have a few Drupal sites running on HostGator and they're all performing brilliantly!  Speed is great, Cpanel is great and they offer 24 hour live customer support, though I haven't needed to use it yet!

So if you're looking for a host for your next Drupal project, I HIGHLY recommend HostGator.com!  No they're not paying me to say any of this, just thought others may benefit from hearing my experience as I have benefitted from other people making posts just like this.

I even signed up for their affiliate program because I am so happy with them and would be happy to recommend them to people!

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Website in a week!

New layout is up! I looooooved my old one with the falling leaves when I first made it, but then as I experimented with making other drupal themes I felt more and more as if I had already progressed passed that design. I wanted to reflect that here on my personal blog so ta-da! I'm still tweaking things, but it's up! I liked the girl on the swing cause, well, she reminds me of me! Happily swinging along, content with the place I'm at right now but still keeping an eye open to what other opportunities may come my way. :)

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French kissin' the dog!

Wow, sorry!  Didn't know the site was down today!  I've been trying to get a better score on websitegrader.com and set up a redirect so that google knows that www.haleystar.com and haleystar.com are the same site.  Never set one up before and I thought I had it working right last night, gues not.......  Anywhoooo
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