From time to time, I like to experiment with clever new ui tricks, and, today, I ran into the jparallax library, which is a jQuery plugin that enables you to add some pretty interesting effects to your site. For those of you like me that didn't know exactly what parallax is, there are better answers available, but in summary, its the way that old side scrolling games achieved their depth by scrolling the background slower than the foreground as your character made its way through the game. There is a really cool demo on the front page of the jparallax site at webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html.
Maybe it is because I grew up with arcades and nintendo in the 80s, but when I first saw the jparallax library today, I figured I had to make a header out of it, at least for a while. So, for a while, anyway, you can see the jparallax jquery plugin at work in the header of this site. It may not be used as intended, but its still a pretty cool effect, and it was really, really simple to implement.
Jesse Foster | jf26028