I wanted to create a free online Spotify style site that used youtube to play music in the background. Here it is in its very early stages of development.

The main problem is filtering the restricted videos from the search, which I’m still working on :S

Enter search:

I have used jQuery quite a lot recently and have picked up some good practice’s and dropped some bad habits, so I thought I’d share what I have learnt, it’s not ground-breaking but simply performance enhancing tips.

Loading jQuery

Using Google Code to load jQuery gives you a several advantages over saving it locally to your server. The most important factor is that the library is probably already cached on the clients machine. If not this is not the case, it’s fast to download from Google’s CDN and saves on your own bandwidth:

Selection

To begin with I used this syntax to select elements on the DOM:

Then I discovered that the find method is up to 70% faster. So use this method where possible:

Chaining

jQuery allows you to chain your functions, which helps you cut down on your selector use too:

Caching

Try and keep your selectors to a minimum by storing regularly accessed elements in variables. You should just select it once and keep the selection in memory by storing it in a variable for access:

Cheat Sheet

I recommend having a cheat sheet close at hand whatever language you are using:
Download jQuery 1.7 Visual Cheat Sheet

Hope this helps you improve you jQuery.