Limi's Sphere of Influence » JavaScript

Lubing up the MPUK forums with Grease

Limi — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:37:23 +0000

It seems that forums cost money (duh) so MPUK have vomited all over their forums with adverts, so here’s the next greasemonkey script to hide them (as in, hide not remove, as in, you still get the impression).

MPUK Forum Adverts Hider v3.0a

2 Firebug extensions I can’t work without

Limi — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:43:34 +0000

If you’ve ever worked with Firebug you’ll know its possibly the best tool out there for aiding in web development within Firefox; thankfully there are some really handy extensions for it to make it even more indispensable!

Firecookie

Allows the same controls that you get with HTML to apply to cookies, so far I had been using the Web Developer toolbar to view/change cookies, however this allows for much easier editing. It also has a feature to show you when cookies are changed, which is great for debugging.

YSlow

This is useful to work out either why your site is running slow, or for you to make improvements to make it faster. It has various rule sets which can be found here which define what exceptions it allows.

IE8 can be forced into IE7 renderer with HTML

Limi — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:24:53 +0000

It’s going to be that time of year again soon, when a browser gets updated and all developers frantically have to make their websites compatible and all working fantastically. However, this time around the team behind Internet Explorer 8 are going to make this much easier on all us devs.

They are doing this by allowing the web-site itself to control which rendering engine IE8 will use when you browse. This will mean if you site is already compatible with IE7, it can also be compatible with IE8 by simply including one line of HTML in the header…

This will apparently force newer version of IE8 to render the current page in IE7’s format, which from a standpoint on the priority of getting things upgraded, can allow it to go a few notches down on the list rather than being the number one.

For once it will be nice to worry about feature sets, improvements and bug fixing rather than worrying if the styling will still work when the next version of IE comes out.

Thank you Microsoft IE team!

Programming API’s all in one place

Limi — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:08:56 +0000

Ever find that you are searching through various programming language’s API sites, and wished that there was an easier way of doing it all? Well I found this site the other day called GotAPI, and on their site it allows you to specify which API’s you are interested in, and from there you get a very clean interface in which to search through them with.

So instead of having to have 5-10 bookmarks for all the different languages I now only need the one. It’s very fast searching and uses the standard web 2.0 style of ajax. But it’s done in a way which is very useful rather than showing off the fact its ajax and it being intrusive and annoying.

You can have as many languages as the site supports open as they all load up in tabs at the top, so you can search between them by just clicking the correct language. It also includes API’s for various databases and major sites such as Flickr as well, so it’s not just useful for programming.

The bottom line, there’s no adverts, it’s fast, free, and all in one place. GotAPI

Ajax Transparent Message

Limi — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 10:21:27 +0000

We have all seen the majority of different ways of displaying feedback to users via Ajax calls, however one I hadn’t seen before caught my eye today. Instead of hijacking the entire screen, or creating new sections or areas on the screen and causing movement, this does a modal dialog type effect… just without the dialog part.

You can see some examples here and here. This is certainly a nicer and softer way of displaying progress as no extra space is used up with the effect. Better still, this has a Ruby on Rails helper already made!