Dojo is our Javascript toolkit of choice and we’ve recently upgraded to Dojo 1.1.1. We’re going to try to pass on some of the knowledge we’ve accrued, starting with how to create your own custom widgets.

Step 1. Determining Inheritance – Typically you’re going to be subclassing an existing widget, so naturally you’ll need to inherit from that widget. But there are several other widgets you may chose to inherit from.

• dijit._Widget: Pretty basic, if you follow each widget’s inheritence you’ll eventually get here, so you probably won’t need to inherit from this unless you’re starting from scratch.
• dijit._Templated: If you want your widget to pull in and use an HTML template
• dijit.layout.ContentPane: Includes some AJAX, as well as layout methods
• dijit._Contained / dijit._Container: To establish parent child relationships between two widgets, the child and parent will need to inherit from each respective widget

Step 2. Writing the Code – Each widget has some pretty basic methods you’ll want to override or add to, check out the widget life cycle to learn about all of them.

Code examples are after the jump.
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Training a new employee is exciting and stressful. You are responsible for the success of a new coworker, but you have to stay on top of your own game simultaneously. You can be confident the days will be shorter, the frustration levels higher, and the bugs more plentiful. This two-part article will give you some tips on how to keep your new employee and your hair from leaving, including tips on teamwork, explaining things, making mistakes, and navigating The Big Picture.

Start with The Big Picture. You should begin training by giving an overview of the company and its projects and later climb down to specifics. Even though your employee will not vividly recall all the general information you give them about the vast array of tools and procedures you use, it’s still important to expose them early on. It is the foundation of their learning, and you can revisit The Big Picture before going into each new tool or area of information to be learned. It takes a lot of sleep to assimilate vast amounts of information to the point where it can be usefully applied.

You’re a team. If you are pointing out a mistake your trainee made, it is often better to say something like “It looks like we forgot to…” or “We accidentally put this in wrong…” This lowers both stress and anxiety and lets you share responsibility for their learning. Share credit for tasks completed with your trainee, even if you did most of the work. They are doing a lot of work by learning. Using these methods, confrontations are minimized, more issues are openly resolved, and enthusiasm and morale are maintained.

It’s OK to make plenty of mistakes. You’re going to mess up, type in the wrong thing, be lost for an example, or explain things in such a way to incite laughter from your coworkers. Don’t worry about it. They would be doing the same thing. It’s more important to admit that you are wrong as soon as you realize it, and work towards finding the correct solution. That’s the essence of your work–problem solving. You’re an expert at making mistakes and finding solutions, not perfectly reciting facts and procedures you already know. Plus, making mistakes in front of new employees will create an atmosphere for them where it’s okay to make mistakes as a part of creative problem solving.

Explain the same things over again and again. You should expect to do this and not get frustrated too easily. Be very patient. Make sure your employee knows it is OK to ask for an explanation of anything you are doing, even twice, thrice, or the umpteenth time. Having them take notes is good, but you can’t expect every piece of information to make it into the notebook, or be easily found and applied to the current situation.

Take a break. Have someone else take over training for a day or two so you can catch up on other pressing issues and recuperate. In part II of this article, we’ll explore some topics to help you along after those first few critical days of training. You will learn about increasing efficiency, preventing burnout, and transitioning your trainee into being a productive employee.

One of the challenges we’re constantly wrestling with is disbelief. Most people simply don’t believe our products can do what we say they can. What can I say? I guess we’re just making cutting edge stuff.

To combat this, we try to find ways to let people test our programs for free. We recently changed our Bar Essay Prep sign up process so that you immediately get access to a free essay after sign up. This way, students can test it out, and only pay for full access if they like it (we hope they do!).

Along with this, I also worked on a website refresh. If you’re studying for the bar in July, or just curious to see how we can grade bar essays automatically check it out.

Tonight our fearless leader and President Ed Brent will be honored at the University of Missouri Presidential Awards Ceremony as Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year!

The award “honors a faculty member for a record of entrepreneurial innovation that demonstrates commercial utility, contributes to the public welfare, and brings visibility to the University of Missouri.”

Well done Ed!