Update 2011-12-14: It seems that a lot of people are coming here from web searches with phrases like “shapefile openlayers.” If all you want to do is display your data in OpenLayers, I’d highly recommend using a program like Quantum GIS to convert your Shapefile to a more web-friendly format like KML or GeoJSON. Both of these formats can be read by OpenLayers directly, and you’ll see faster performance and more browser compatibility than if you were to load your Shapefiles directly.

I’m working on a project where there is a long, scrolling page and I wanted to have a dialog that is draggable and resizeable that does not scroll away when the user scrolls down. As far as I could tell, there is no option to do this with jQuery UI’s dialog widget. But there is a quick workaround: dialogDiv.dialog().parent().css('position', 'fixed'); I use the parent because the dialog widget wraps the content in another <div> that contains the content and the other elements of the dialog box (title bar, &c.