As I mentioned I was reading John Resig's Pro JavaScript Techniques recently (I actually finished it today.) The last chapter deals with the future of the language, and goes into a few different JS related technologies on the horizon- the <canvas> element, Comet, etc. One technology featured I'd never actually played around with was ECMAScript for XML (E4X.) Reading the sample code, I realized it could potentially be really useful, so I decided to take it for a little spin this afternoon, just to get a feel for what it might be like to work with. I came up with the following…
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I'm reading John Resig's excellent Pro JavaScript Techniques. A great book for any JavaScript programmers in the audience.
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People hijack my images all over the web. Yes. It's true. While I'm not 100% happy about it, I'm also not 100% upset about it since I'm glad that people like my images enough to swipe them. So I tolerate it.

One thing that would make it all a lot more palatable is if people who were taking my images would link back to my site. The link would serve as credit, would drive traffic, and would increase my page rank. What's not to love?

To that end, I wrote up a little script last week that I attached to all my gallery images to maybe, just maybe, help people to do just that.
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Twice this morning I did massive, repetitive, string manipulations with JavaScript.

One took a list of files, turned it into an array and then looped through creating .htaccess entries.

The other took an HTML table output by Excel and turned it into a Definition List. I then used FireBug to copy the innerHTML of the body and pasted it into a new document, ready to be manipulated in the application I'm building (with JavaScript of course ) If you're curious, here's the code for that one:

<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
    var trs = document.getElementsByTagName("TR");
    var newString ="<dl>";

    for (i=0;i<trs.length;i++){
        var tds=trs[i].getElementsByTagName("TD");
        newString +="<dt id='"+tds[1].innerHTML+"'>"+tds[4].innerHTML+"</dt>";
        newString +="<dd>"+tds[5].innerHTML+"</dd>";
    }
    newString +="</dl>"
    document.body.innerHTML=newString;
    }
</script>

Anyway, I've done this sort of thing before and I realized that I'm using JavaScript for the sort of administrative scripting that other people would use Perl or Python for.

No, there's nothing more to this post than that.

I just wanted to point it out since it struck me as interesting.

Does anyone else out there use JS for this sort of thing?

Or am I a complete weirdo?

I finally got around to compressing this site's JavaScript file last night. I used /packer/ because I know that it supports conditional compilation. I'm a fan of conditional compilation.

It was funny because there were a couple of lines missing semi-colons that I must have looked at a thousand times before last night and just never noticed that they were nekkid like that. JSLint helped me out a lot with making sure the file was ready for packing.

Anyway, between gzipping and compressing it my JS file screams out to the browser at a tidy 2.67 KB (down from an unadulterated 9.41 KB.) There are probably functions in some libraries larger than that…

Go small or go home!