I have updated GPlotter to make use of the revised Google Maps API. I also completely restructured the Javascript to a much more object oriented coding style. I am using the latest release of Prototype, which recently moved to a new location as well as posted a great deal of new documentation. I am using Prototype for the object inheritance and AJAX functionality.
GPlotter still works as it did before but Google did change the zoom level. You will want to change the zoom level in your XML files. (see Zoom Level Order) The documentation explains the new zoom should be 17 minus the old zoom value.
Perhaps best of all, to change GPlotter for your own custom purposes you can use the Prototype inheritance mechanism to inherit and extend GPlotter. And if you do extend or customize GPlotter I would like to see your changes. I would be happy to consider incorporating your changes into GPlotter if the new features are helpful to others.
I have been reading Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig. It is an excellent book. I have also started reading his blog. He recently posted Hacking Digg with Firebug and jQuery. I did not know about a couple of things that he covers. First, I did not realize a bookmarklet in Firefox could load a remote script library. Second, I did not realize that Firebug could do all of that. You have to watch his video.
Now that I am equipped with those techniques, I decided to try it out on CNN.com. The following bookmarklet prompts you for a new headline and then changes it for you with a nice fade in effect. This is all due to the features in jQuery which comes in at 20k. It is really a very impressive Javascript library.
I hit MSDN a lot to look up documentation. Since I typically use Firefox which does not have an MSDN option in the search box I wanted to create another quick way to search MSDN. Below is a bit of Javascript which you can save on 1 line as a bookmark. This is commonly called a bookmarklet. It will prompt you for your search terms and then take you to the results.
I have been building a simple website with some of the web 2.0 signature features like AJAX, RSS, OPML and tagging. It even has an moniker at the bottom indicating it is currently an alpha release. Soon I hope to have it ready for the Beta moniker.
The website works as a social bookmarking system to allow the user to save links from any computer to their LinkMindr account. The focus is on the timeliness of the links with features to give the user access to recently added links. As a part of that focus, RSS feeds are available to access the 20 latest links and links added in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. These feeds work well as Live Bookmarks in Firefox. They also work with IE7 but accessing the feeds is a bit clumsy. Below the videos show how LinkMindr works with Firefox.
I would like to get more feedback. To get you started I have created a video demo on YouTube which is shown below. You can also use the other video alternatives: SWF, WMV for higher quality.
There has been some IE7 bashing on Digg.com lately. Sure it can be fun, but the recent rants were just inaccurate. They were uninformed of the history or IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and the corrections which went into IE7. Some context is necessary here. Just consider that Netscape 4 was dominant when IE6 was released. The Javascript and CSS support in Netscape 4 was horrendous when you compare it to IE6, which stood still for 5 years. Given what we have managed to do with IE6 you have to give the IE6 developers some credit. Understanding the history and the recent changes will help you cope with the changes over the coming years.
Last year I discovered the IE7 Script which adds functionality to IE6 which is being added to IE7, such as more comprehensive DOM support and CSS corrections. It does a bit of magic by simply adding missing functions which are a part of the DOM standard which call the existing functionality of IE6 which happens to use a different name or technique to accomplish the same task.
What it allows you to do is start writing Javascript against the standard DOM interface for IE6 and IE7 transparently.
The very same technique can be used for any browser to add missing standards support. It allows you to include more browsers in your supported suite of browsers while writing the same code for each web browser. See more from Eric Meyer.
I just came across Bindows. It does so much more than I have seen with other AJAX frameworks. For starters, it can produce a full application which looks exactly like a rich desktop application with the Windows XP theme. And with the included theme support you can change the theme to look like any platform. Of course it also has AJAX functionality, but that seems like a given when you consider everything else it does. Try out the demo. You will be impressed.
Last week I had an exchange with Geoff over code formatting in a blog and suggested it could be done with Javascript. We both happen to run Wordpress for our blogs and I have also been looking for a way to insert stylized code into blog entries, so I helped him to put together a solution. Pretty soon we had a solution. Initially I suggested that it could be done with a bit of Javascript. He considered creating his own new script, but like any pragmatic developer, he looked and found an existing solution called dp.SyntaxHighlighter instead of starting from scratch.
To get the dp.SyntaxHighlighter working with Wordpress you have to handle a couple of details. First, assuming you have turned off the WYSIWYG edit mode, Wordpress adjusts your text by encoding certain characters (such as &, < and >) before sending it to the web browser. Second, Wordpress places break tags (<br />) at the end of each line. But Wordpress does have support to get around these details.
Web development can be tricky as it involves various technologies from HTML, CSS, Javascript and then the server-side programming languages. Fortunately with Visual Studio 2005 you are pretty well covered. To debug an ASP.NET web form, you can simply place a breakpoint in your code-behind, set the page as your Start Page and hit F5. That is as easy as can be, but when you deal with Javascript or custom server controls with Design-Time support there other debugging techniques you can employ.
