Moving…
I'm paying two webhosting companies a total of $30 a month, so I thought I'd try to consolidate that, which means moving stuff off of the server this blog is hosted on. May experience some temporary interruptions...
Accessing GM_xmlhttprequest from event handlers bound by jQuery
So I like jQuery. And I like Greasemonkey. I especially like the ability of Greasemonkey's ajax calls to go cross-domain. But how do I get access to this functionality in my event handlers? Calling GM_xmlhttprequest in a method that doesn't execute while the Greasemonkey sandbox is still alive doesn't work. At first I didn't think it was possible, but I discovered a way...using setInterval.
Google Reader Commenter script
At Esther's request, I wrote a script that lets you comment on blogs that are in your Google Reader list. Right now it only works on Blogger and WordPress blogs, but that's actually a fair number of blogs.
Requirements: Firefox, Greasemonkey Plugin
Check it out here: GitHub repository
Here's a picture: Picture
Projects updates
Eh, so none of my projects strike me as interesting anymore. The stylometry app seemed sort of gimicky (and pseudo-science at best), and the blog app is sort of ho hum web 2.0 ruby framework stuff. And if I wanted it to be a good blog, even remotely comparable to WordPress...I'd have to put in dozens of hours.
Now I need to figure out what a good use of my time is. Pretty sure Left 4 Dead isn't it, but it is quite entertaining. I think what I need to do is...instead of trying to come up with ideas for projects out of the blue, come up with ideas that are solutions for problems I'm having, something I would use and benefit from even if no one else did. My Notepad app sort of fits that description, but is very limited in scope. I would like something bigger to work on, that still meets that description...
DEPRECATED: Announcing: jQuery optimization races
Note...this site is down for now...
You don't have to understand it to see that it's at least a bit interesting, so check it out:
http://www.nutriscan.org/jquery_optimization/
It documents a bunch of different ways of doing similar things, and compares them in terms of performance. How much are you really losing by using the jQuery convenience method?
Google Visualization API + jQuery
TODO: bring animations to charts in the Google Visualization API via jQuery to illustrate performance described in previous post.
jQuery performance
TODO: write a series of test cases that illustrate ways to write high-performance jQuery.
Projects in progress
I have many projects in progress...
1) "Anybody can program" book, have half of the outline for the first draft done
2) Stylometry web app, have some of the backend services done that calculate stylometry stats
a) Dictionary looker upper, reasonably complete for Merriam-Webster only
3) Blog application, just a few thoughts on paper and a few lines of code
4) Notepad, a note-keeping application, could pass for done
5) Merb Google RSS feed sample application, could pass for done
6) jQuery_merb, a javascript library bridging the gap between jQuery/javascript and merb. limited scope, but could pass for done
7) merb_solitary_part, a merb slice for hitting parts outside of "regular" requests. Needs some renaming/refactoring and some docs, but could pass for done
8 ) Kollaba, a site for finding collaborators to work on...anything. fair bit of progress on it, but probably dead.
9) merb-rails upload benchmark application, basically creating the same simple application in both versions. done enough to be used for benchmarks, at least (and yes, merb's faster).
Phew. I need to finish some stuff! But new ideas are so much more exciting...
Mini sample merb application
Made a little sample application: http://github.com/nanodeath/merb_example_google_rss
It's already got 3 followers, which is sorta cool. It's just a little thing that makes a Google search query and RSS-izes it. Uses Haml for the templating engine, which is officially awesome.
Merb Blog?
So this is a bit ambitious, but I want my next project to be a feather-like blog. Feather-like in that it's simple, uses Merb, and is a blog, but probably that's it. Also, extensible to the point of ridiculosity. We'll see how far that goes. I plan on having it be similar to Feather too in that it'll be open source and a learning tool, I hope.