These are the tools I use when doing web development.
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I’ve had a heavy JavaScript workload for a while, and these are some thoughts/observations.
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I’ve recently been writing documentation at work, and have been writing it in HTML, which is more or less my native format for that kind of writing. In doing so, I’ve been focusing more on document structure and how it aids usability for the reader. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve also started to focus on how it might improve usability for the author.
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Years back I wrote some online tutorials on how to animate circular movement in Lingo and JavaScript. While moving my older articles to this site, I realized that I could not in good conscience move this one without updating it. So, a tutorial on circular animation in JavaScript follows.
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After collaborating with me on an AJAX enhancement to our web application, my co-worker Ryan today asked me to give our engineering group an introduction to AJAX techniques. That seems like an interesting idea, so I’m going to sketch out the kind of thing such an introduction might cover.
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I made a Greasemonkey script that shows you more cars per reservation page than the measly 5 that Zipcar gives you.
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I’m on a big Greasemonkey kick at the moment, and have decided that I’m going to make a small project of improving Zipcar‘s user interface.
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My mind is very much focused on coding at the moment. Especially JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
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I created a very hacky plugin for TiddlyWiki that will place a node titled with the date at the top of the page if you open the page on that date. In other words, you can create a node with a specific date, and when you open TiddlyWiki on that date you’ll see that node.
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I had to do some screen-scraping today, and found myself doing it in JavaScript, just because JavaScript is able to understand the DOM. I would prefer to be able to walk the HTML DOM in another scripting language, like Perl, Ruby, or Python.
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I’m not a fan of proprietary software, and I’m trying to make sure I don’t start using any more of it. In addition, I don’t like most Microsoft products, and PowerPoint is really low on my list. On the other hand, I need something with which to make presentations for work. Enter S5, Eric Meyer’s XHTML/CSS/JavaScript presentation tool.
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I’ve been using TiddlyWiki over the last few months, and love it. It’s essentially a wiki-in-a-file, but the difference between a server-side wiki and the extremely lightweight TiddlyWiki is profound.
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I had reason to use the JavaScript Function object, or rather its Function constructor, for the first time today. Using it helped me avoid using either global variables or eval() calls.
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I started working on my bookmarking project, and have the JavaScript side more or less worked out.
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Firebug is an amazing web development extension for Firefox. Anyone who does any web development should use it.
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As discussed in yesterday’s post about multiple AJAX requests, I wrote an enhanced version of my bookmarklet for improving the magictraders.com price lists.
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In working on an enhancement to my card price list sorting bookmarklet, I ran into a problem: if you want to collate data from a number of sources asynchronously, combine the data, then do something with all of it, how do you do that in JavaScript?
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I spent some time today creating a bookmarklet (copy the contents of this page into Firefox or another Gecko-based browser) and greasemonkey script for enhancing the magictraders.com pricelists. This kind of thing exemplifies what I love about HTML, and why I distrust less open technologies.
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For a while I’ve toyed with the idea of building an application to track my browsing. Something along the lines of del.icio.us, but with files saved to my server.
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JavaScript can be really picky about what it accepts as “XML”, and in most AJAX uses it requires that the server send it something with the correct MIME type. This can get really annoying if you’re trying to deal with local XML from your filesystem, because the browser will treat it as text, and the AJAX functions will error out. So, I finally decided I’d had enough, started looking into using the DOMParser, discovered it didn’t exist in IE, and then found a post about a DOMParser for IE and Safari.
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There’s something about it I really like. I’m not entirely sure what that is, but at this point I seem to like it more than other kinds of software development. I don’t think that this is merely because I’ve done more of it than anything else.
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I had these up on a random page on my site and thought I might as well put them here.

If the PURL page has been coded correctly, these will display the field name in *front* of the field contents.

To use this, right-click on the following link and select “Bookmark this link” or “Add to Favorites”: ‘ + prefix + ‘: ‘ + cA[i].innerHTML; } } } })();”>Field Expansion Bookmarklet for IE 6.0 and IE Mac