In the last four websites I’ve built, I’ve used four different jQuery carousel plugins. I’m not really a super fan of carousels, I think they’re kitschy and make for bad UX. They’re the twenty-ten’s version of a flash intro screen. But designers throw them in and clients like them, and I don’t always get to make all the decisions around here.

Since I’m pretty much an expert at it by now, let me tell you about the process of how to find a jQuery carousel that you hate. First, you hit up Google, and pin the command key down while clicking on links until your tabs look like the Nintendo version of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the top of your browser.

Then you sift through all the  articles like “500 Great Responsive Carousels” and “25 Carousels that are the Last Carousel You’ll Ever Need” until you have a list of twenty or so GitHub pages. Then you start looking through the demos, most of which won’t work. Then you download the code and see if you can get it working. Most you won’t be able to, so you spend some time looking at the documentation and making adjustments and fixes until you get some of them to work. Then you exclude the ones that make the browser run slowly because they’re so bloated. Then you spend some time figuring out the API’s that the plugin vendors wrote to make it “easy” for you to change up the features. When they prove too much effort, you just rewrite the code yourself, slashing out wide swaths of code you probably don’t need until you’ve got a somewhat lean plugin. Then you spend forever working around the skins that they built in since your carousel needs to look different. In the end, you’ll end up with one plugin that kind of works, but is buggy or broken bloated or otherwise inadequate.

I finally got tired of this process, which is why I have contributed my own addition to the jQuery carousel mess. I call it Gallop, and it’s intentionally very simple, barebones, and featureless. We’re web developers. We know how to tweak some jQuery to get the features that we want working. We can adjust CSS to make things look right. We don’t need massive plugins with complicated mechanisms to control a million possible configurations. Maybe we just want some divs to slide across the screen, ok? Is that so hard?

No, it turns out it’s not so hard. Less than 100 lines of jQuery, a little more CSS. You just put an unordered list in a div, and it works. The code is incredibly easy to follow, and if you want to change around the features, you just directly edit the code! If you want an additional feature, you just add it right in!

Anyway, here’s the GitHub page. I even made a fun little demo for it as well. Hopefully this simplifies the jQuery plugin process for some people.