Barklund.org

The twenty-second idea for my 365 social ideas is not really a clear-cut idea – yet. But I feel a need for a new website traffic analyzing service. Google Analytics is definitely the mostly used and best free service. But they have many shortcomings, and I definitely would like to see a new player enter this playing field. And while where add it, there are some new trends and actions, that current has a huge influence on current traffic trends, that you cannot track fully: social media traffic.

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The sixteenth idea for my 365 social ideas is an idea for a technical tool to assist everyone in getting the credit they deserve and the loyalty they can expect: a copy-paste injection script. It is the very same idea that tynt.com has “created”, but they keep the technology (how simple it may be) to themselves and have even filed for a patent.

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The second idea for my 365 social ideas is news aggregation-based as well as usability-oriented. The idea is a cross between the fascinatingly simple Readability bookmarklet and the recently launched Danish online newspaper “Ugen” (Eng: “The Week”), which is a downloadable AIR-application for news reading.

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We got the XKCD book “volume 0″ here at work yesterday, and I have of course skimmed through it many times already. I quickly found the solution to the page numbering scheme, but wanted to see if I could find a simple conversion formula from real number to XKCD page number and vice versa.

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Datasets are quite an un-impressive part of the HTML 5 specification. It is only accompanied by two examples, of which the first is relevant but small and the latter is (in my view) completely besides the potential of this new functionality. Datasets are in short a way to store custom values on nodes in the DOM tree. This has always been possible when working client-side through JavaScript by keeping a mapping between the nodes and the values stored, which meant that the values weren’t actually stored on the nodes, but just related to the nodes elsewhere (e.g. using jQuery.data).

With HTML 5 and the introduction of datasets, we can do something new. The main advantage and the really huge application area for datasets are, that you can include custom attributes in the serverside-rendered HTML, that the client-side script will use to enhance the browsing experience.

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I just saw the most impressive, intelligent use of the regular expression backtracking engine and simply have to re-post it in order to give my own decryption of the infinitely simple expression. In short, it is a regular expression, that only matches non-prime sequences of 1’s. And it goes like this:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/

I will try to explain it in a simple way and then do some benchmarking on this simple expression, a slightly optimized version of the expression as well as compare it to more optimal algorithms.

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As I have posted recently, my (former) sharing service of choice was ShareThis. No really good reason for that choice actually, just came by their service first, and it worked like a charm. But now it doesn’t anymore (update: well it does again, but there were problems), so I looked around for alternatives.

The largest such (might even be larger than ShareThis) is AddThis. Their API is incredibly simple, as you can actually share anything by giving a simply link to their site with url and title of what to share.

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I have recently become a fan of Google’s very simple JavaScript API. The sole purpose of this project is to avoid all of us including common libraries like SWFObject or jQuery in every project we create and instead load it from a central (updated) repository. I have since used this in many projects.

However, who decides which libraries to include and how common should a library be, before Google will include it? Personally I believe they should add SWFAddress to the list of supported libraries as well.

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This feature does currently not work – see list of updates below

ShareThis is a great service for adding shareability to your website in a very simple way. It even includes the “tip a friend” option, so you don’t need to code that for your own site. I will describe how to embed it from flash.

Note 2009/05/19: Due to changes in the ShareThis API popup-functionality is broken currently (both in my example and in some of my live projects). I have filed a bug with ShareThis to fix this ASAP.

Note 2009/05/21: ShareThis have now fixed the above bug but there is still a minor JavaScript error thrown. The popup works now though as it should from both JS and Flash.

Note 2009/06/08: ShareThis now broke it again. And this time their support staff doesn’t answer. Please see an example implemented with AddThis instead.

Note 2009/06/19: ShareThis finally fixed it again. They wrote a mail on the 17th to me stating the bug was reintroduced when they implemented CDN, but would be fixed in the next release. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Note 2009/08/14: ShareThis has recently implemented a brand new version of their service – and surprise: it is not backwards compatible. Thus my popup example is broken again. I will investigate and fix soon.

Note 2009/08/17: ShareThis has promised to deliver a flash API within a few weeks. Let’s see what happens then…

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Was: self-currying JavaScript functions

I read this nice post on self-currying JavaScript functions, and even though the code to me is not optimal (dispite the low line count), it is improperly named, and it depends on the Prototype JavaScript library (which I really don’t like), it is a very nice script and a very nice idea. The trick in this script is using Function.prototype.length. I didn’t know that this property existed, but after digging a bit I’ve realized, that it has been in ECMAScript at least since 3rd edition (which is the latest edition published in 1999), in JavaScript since v1.1, but only made it into ActionScript by ActionScript 3 (which I haven’t study in as much detail as I have with ActionScript 1 and 2 in relation to my book on basic programming in these versions).

In this post I discuss this property and functionality a bit further, and I implement this function for creating self-”partially applying” functions using both no framework, the MochiKit framework and the Prototype framework.

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