Archive for the ‘javascript’ Category

WordPress AutoSave

Monday, May 21st, 2007

I’ve created a Greasemonkey script (and a Firefox Add-on) that adds an unobtrusive AutoSave feature to WordPress 2.0.2 and probably all the other WordPress versions 2.x. Could be that it even works with previous WordPress versions.

I decided I need to write the script after I lost a half of a post two times in a row because I accidentally pressed the ‘Back’ button on my new ThinkPad keyboard. This annoyed me so much I went to check if there are AutoSave plugins available. When I didn’t find any (one had the page unavailable, the other possibility was upgrading to 2.2) I decided to write a GM script. It’s pretty easy and as I wrote it the functionality enhanced itself. It’s useful for me, it might also be useful for you.

More about the WordPress AutoSave script on its own page.

More mix

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

I hear that other blogs are covering the mix pretty goood, so I’m not even going to try to compete. I don’t have much time to surf the web or open and more importantly read the feeds.

I’ll just mention a few things I find interesting. The first one would be the DLR or the possibility to run dynamic languages in the .net environment. They’re saying that Iroonpython is much faster than the defaul implementation because of the platform. I guess this should give hope to Ruby developers that one day Ruby’s gonna be fast. They even wrote a new JScript parser for it.

Sitting in the biSitting in the big Palazzo M room waiting for the last keynote also gives me time to comment on a few other things. It’s really hard to be thirsty or hungry around here. There’s free stuff everywhere – lots of it. The breakfast and lunch are full meals, not only quick bites or fingerfood, which is also great.

As I said in the previous post it is a bit cold though. The fiifth floor where I’m at now is ok, but the fourth where most of the sessions happen is less comfortable. It’s too cold for short sleeves but not cold enough that a sweater would be a perfect solution.

The conference staff is really friendly, not only the Microsoft but all the others as well. What is lacking is more charging stations which forces users to squat the hallways where you can plug yourself into the matrix directly.

Another thing I noticed was that a lot of people have tablet or tablet convertible portable computers. I find this very interesting since there aren’t really that many different models available. Also there aren’t may macs here, which was expected since that’s the competition. I sometimes feel a bit out of line with my linux powered Nokia N800.

More tomorrow. If you want to read more about the conference visit technorati and search for mix07. If you don’t like to read or want to ask something visit Spletne urice @ Kiberpipa on wednesday, May 9 2007.

OpenID.si launched!

Monday, April 9th, 2007

I’ve launched a Slovenian OpenID site at openid.si. I’m looking for other Slovenian OpenID enthusiasts that would help build a meaningful center for all Slovenian OpenID users and developers.

It’s a long road that OpenID has to travel to become a serious player on the landscape of the internet. If you think it’s the right way to go and are willing to do something about it you’re welcome to join us – contact details at openid.si.

At the same time I would like to mention that we’ll be having (probably the first Slovenian) OpenID talk at Spletne urice on 18 April at 19:00. Sebastjan Trepca, the founder of Slovenian Orthodox Users of Python, developer of Marela and a web developer at Parsek, will be talking about what OpenID is and how to implement a client and a server.

If you want to read more about OpenID head over to openid.si to find a bunch of OpenID resource links. If you have more don’t hesitate to email.

WPF/E competition

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Yesterday was a fine day that ended with a talk about the WindowsVista.si website (now offline). It’s made with WPF/E technology and is made to mimic the look & feel of the real Vista operating system. A great showcase of the technology.

There’s been much talk about WPF. The whole Windows Foundation Platform seems to be competition to the Adobe Apollo platform. They’re both made to create desktop applications. Apollo seems to be on top with the cross-platformness while Microsoft is putting its hopes on the size of the Windows developer community.

When we come ‘down’ to WPF/E (the E stands for Everywhere), the competitor everyone is talking about is Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. They both solve a lot of common problems – animation, multimedia, drawing – stuff that you can’t do in HTML. But when you look under the hood of WindowsVista.si you’ll find there’s a bunch of JavaScripts that seem to do all the magic. And the code looks much like when you’re working with the infamous <canvas> tag.

This was also confirmed by the developer of the page – due to the limitations of the current plugin and it’s work with XAML everything on the page is dynamically created with JavaScript and is not present in the source XAML file. Since there are no components available he actually wrote all the controls himself – tabview, scrolling, panes, menus, windows,…

Two things come to mind:

  1. Direct3D vs OpenGL battle that went on about a decade ago
  2. document.layer vs document.all and the time of the DynamicDuo

Seems like a good idea would be to write a library that will seamlessly switch between WPF/E, and Flash whether they’re present or not. Especially since the tag will obviouslly never be trully cross platform (at least for a while) and that WPF/E doesn’t yet have a plugin for all platforms & browsers. Then again – what’s wrong with Flash?

There once was…

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

A few years back there was this web agency that had a sister company that was into online advertising. At about the same time a lot of changes were happening in the advertising market and some innovations were needed. There was also a young web developer that was eager to create something impressive. Something cross-browser which wasn’t as easy then as it is today with YUI and others.

The developer took on a challenge of creating a new banner format that was already being used on some foreign sites. With a twist – the idea was to make it work on more than just the most popular browser. It was possible but some advance testing and expert “guessing” needed to be done. The challenge proved to be difficult but not unsolvable.

Since the script were to be used on advertising sites that already had their own JavaScript the functions needed to be ‘namespaced’ in order to avoid clashes. The developer wasn’t going to create an object but instead prefixed all his functions with an acronym. The acronym was chosen as an experiment – its meaning was hidden to see if others would just adopt it.

Every now and then I still get a floating banner to implement to a site. Not my primary focus anymore but still. And I always get a smile on my face when I see that the closing function is called “praHide” – “pra” is the acronym and it stands for “Parsek Rich Ad”. The code has changed since the first implementation and different agencies have different JavaScript functions. The name stayed the same though. I guess it became a sort of a standard. As has the 500×500 which we started using back in the day…

JavaScript sorting – the talk

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Last week I had an emergency talk about JavaScript sorting since the original speaker had a last minute change of schedule. I decided to have a talk about sorting since I was just finishing my research into sorting algorithms.

The talk went quite ok – I wish I had more time to prepare though. There were just a few real JavaScript developers in the crowd so it was more challenging than I thought. I was hoping to get a bigger crowd because of the Ajax in the title, but I guess they saw right through me..

The slides to the talk are already online. I’ll be preparing a short article about what I found out soon.

There’s another talk today at Spletne urice, this time a case study about Debikartica.