<story><title>JQuery plugins site accidentally deleted - last backup one year old.</title><url>http://blog.jquery.com/2011/12/08/what-is-happening-to-the-jquery-plugins-site/#pluginstldr</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>One rule to live by:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Never use 3rd party javascript&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the 15-odd years I&apos;ve been doing client-side web development, I&apos;ve seen precisely one piece of script on the internet that worked as advertised and was durable enough to consider including in one my projects.  That exception to the rule is jQuery itself.&lt;p&gt;jQuery &lt;i&gt;plugins&lt;/i&gt;, however, exemplify that golden rule.  Every time I&apos;ve tried to use one (being a hopeless optimist and breaking my own rule), I&apos;ve been bitten hard and ended up either rewriting it from scratch or spending more time trying to get it to work in a reliable manner than it would have taken to rewrite it from scratch.&lt;p&gt;I have no idea why this has to be the case, but it is.  Javascript you find on the internet is worse than worthless.  As such, while it&apos;s a shame they lost their plugin site, we&apos;re all probably a little better off for having to write our own stuff for a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>That sounds like an excuse for NIH. It&apos;s an easy one to make because there are so. many. bad. jquery. &quot;plugins&quot;. But there are also excellent ones; for instance, it seems like a big waste of time to replace jQuery Cycle. Similarly, I&apos;m 50/50 on implementing dynamic tables by hand and using DataTables, but it seems silly to say &quot;never use DataTables&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>JQuery plugins site accidentally deleted - last backup one year old.</title><url>http://blog.jquery.com/2011/12/08/what-is-happening-to-the-jquery-plugins-site/#pluginstldr</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>One rule to live by:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Never use 3rd party javascript&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the 15-odd years I&apos;ve been doing client-side web development, I&apos;ve seen precisely one piece of script on the internet that worked as advertised and was durable enough to consider including in one my projects.  That exception to the rule is jQuery itself.&lt;p&gt;jQuery &lt;i&gt;plugins&lt;/i&gt;, however, exemplify that golden rule.  Every time I&apos;ve tried to use one (being a hopeless optimist and breaking my own rule), I&apos;ve been bitten hard and ended up either rewriting it from scratch or spending more time trying to get it to work in a reliable manner than it would have taken to rewrite it from scratch.&lt;p&gt;I have no idea why this has to be the case, but it is.  Javascript you find on the internet is worse than worthless.  As such, while it&apos;s a shame they lost their plugin site, we&apos;re all probably a little better off for having to write our own stuff for a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rufugee</author><text>That&apos;s an incredibly broad brush you&apos;re painting with there. I&apos;ve used things like jqgrid and datatables for years now with great success.</text></comment>