Fun with scripts

Mmm, I’m making more use of dynamic scripts on the new blog than ever before. Not only am I using jQuery, thanks to all I learned about it while writing ZB’s scripts, but I even rewrote some of my old scripts like my Headline Image Replacement with jQuery. In HIR’s case, the script went from 8 kilobytes to about 400 bytes. Yay jQuery! In addition, I serve a pre-compressed version of jQuery to browsers that can handle it (not IE), which makes jQuery + all my scripts + new scripts smaller than the old stuff!

There are four main scripts that I’m using to make things nice. My Where’s Seth script is back, but now instead of just pulling from my Google Calendar, it also works off Jabber away messages that my Trillian client sends. I need to make it more robust, so we’ll see what other ways I can pull information, such as Twitter feeds. For my linkblog, I rolled a little bit of jQuery to fetch JSON data from Ma.gnolia (which is like del.icio.us but nicer), so I don’t have to maintain links in two separate places.

On the WordPress plugins side, I’ve added OpenID and Gravatar support. WP-OpenID allows commenters to use their OpenID, both to verify their identity and to obviate having to type all that commenter info every time. Gravatar was acquired by WordPress, which makes me finally comfortable enough to use it on a blog. Before, it was just too unstable– the service was unavailable all the time and I didn’t feel like it was “official” enough to make it widespread and worth using. With official adoption by WordPress, it should become more of a de facto standard, one that I feel comfortable supporting.

Javascript is fun :O

Dewdles by Sam