Steve Kemp's Blog

Recently I took stock of my Javascript programming efforts, with the intention of simplifying things. To date I've put together three sites which make use of Javascript:

debian-administration.org

There isn't very much javascript in use upon this site, and you might be forgiven for thinking there was none at all if you don't have an account, or don't login.

There's a tagging system which is starting to creak under the sheer number of different tags, and several back-end parts of the site make use of AJAX calls.

Most of the script lives in a single file common.js which I cobbled via a process of trial and error, augmented with a little copy & paste coding.

It works. But I knew I could do better ..

ctrl-alt-date

This was my first attempt to make a site be truely dynamic and "pretty". It has succeeded in that respect, although the lack of members makes the site itself essentially a failure.

This time round I decided that I'd utterly refuse to write my own Javascript. So instead I used script.aculo.us (damn I hate those ugly URLS).

This library made it almost too easy to add flash. I liked it a lot.

Having said that though the sheer scope of the library and the way it didn't fit in the way that I coded made it painful to use at times.

It works, and it works well. Like it? Yes. Love it no?

mail-scanning.com

This site has a fair amount of javascript upon it, but that isn't obvious unless you're actually a user. The only piece that I can recall is the real-time count of spam caught upon the front-page. (Realtime stats are cool!)

Most of the code here is the simple kind, reverting back to the way I worked on the Debian Administration site; we're talking about basic effects such as:

• show/hide a div
• make an AJAX request every now and again.
• Do a bit of auto-completion.

To get more of a feel for whats out there I wrote this initially with my own code, then later migrated it to jQuery.

Quite frankly jQuery rocks. The way it works is a little strange at first, but it is so natural after a while. As an example:

// find the div called "foo" - hide it.
$("#foo").hide()

I'm liking this library a lot recently, but only time will tell if I use it more.

In conclusion I filed #473125: ITP jQuery failing to see the existing ITP already present.

Once the package makes it through the NEW queue I will update it to follow the skeletal javascript-policy.

I disagree about the naming scheme suggested by that policy primarily because we already have packages of several of the "big" javascript libraries, such as scriptalicious, and see no gain in renaming them. But otherwise the policy is sane enough; following it will cause no harm at the very least.

ObQuote: Stand By Me

François Marier has recently been posting some interesting entries about the Mutt mail client upon his blog.

His tips are pretty basic, but that doesn't make them less useful. So here's my tip of the day: reply_regexp.

When you're viewing a mail, and you choose to reply it the subject of that mail is the basis of your message's subject. For example given a message with "Subject: hello" your reply will typically have the subject "Subject: Re: hello".

This is real rocket science here, people.

Imagine you're using SPAM filtering which tags messages it isn't sure about with a prefix "UNS:". Suddenly things don't look so hot, as you might end up with a mail with the subject:

Subject: UNS: Re: Hello

Reply to that mail, whilst being half-asleep, and what do you get? You get this:

Subject: Re: UNS: Re: Hello

Bad. Ugly. Wrong.

The following snippet in my ~/.muttrc file correctly deals with this case:

set reply_regexp="^(((UNS:[ \t])|[rR][eE]:[ \t])*)+"

Neat. Cool. Nice.

I've paid for some advertising upon the LWN.net site. (No link, I'm not trying to game things here.)

I didn't know what to expect, but I was willing to risk the expenditure as a way of saying thanks to them for their great content. (Because of my Debian Project membership I get a free LWN subscription, as do all developers. see here for details if you're a developer without a subscription.)

I've paid $30 and that has given me a months run of my advert, with clickthroughs hovering around 1%. Not horribly bad at all!

I probably won't repeat the experiment for the forseeable future, but I'm glad that I did it at least once.

If you have something appropriate for a Debian-based audience don't forget you're welcome to advertise upon the Debian Administration website for free - See the Advert FAQ for details.

ObQuote: The Craft

Update: jquery was accepted yesterday. Today I uploaded a new version to more closely align it with the javascript-policy.

Well a brief post about what I've been up to over the past few days.

An alioth project was created for the maintainance of the bash-completion package. I spent about 40 minutes yesterday committing fixes to some of the low-lying fruit.

I suspect I'll do a little more of that, and then back off. I only started looking at the package because there was a request-for-help bug filed against it. It works well enough for me with some small local additions

The big decision for the bash-completion project is how to go forwards from the current situation where the project is basically a large monolithic script. Ideally the openssh-client package should contain the completion for ssh, scp, etc..

Making that transition will be hard. But interesting.

In other news I submitted a couple of "make-work" patches to the QPSMTPD SMTP proxy - just tidying up a minor cosmetic issues. I'm starting to get to the point where I understand the internals pretty well now, which is a good thing!

I love working on QPSMTPD. It rocks. It is basically the core of my antispam service and a real delight to code for. I cannot overemphasise that enough - some projects are just so obviously coded properly. Hard to replicate, easy to recognise...

I've been working on my own pre-connection system which is a little more specialied; making use of the Class::Pluggable library - packaged for Debian by Sarah.

(The world -> Pre-Connection/Load-Balancing Proxy -> QPSMTPD -> Exim4. No fragility there then ;)

Finally I made a tweak to the Debian Planet configuration. If you have Javascript disabled you'll no longer see the "Show Author"/"Hide Author" links. This is great for people who use Lynx, Links, or other minimal browsers.

TODO:

I'm still waiting for the creation of the javascript project to be setup so that I can work on importing my jQuery package.

I still need to sit down and work through the Apache2 bugs I identified as being simple to fix. I've got it building from SVN now though; so progress is being made!

Finally this weekend I need to sit down and find the time to answer Steve's "Team Questionnaire". Leave it any longer and it'll never get answered. Sigh.

ObQuote: Shooting Fish

Over the past few nights I've managed to successfully migrate the Debian Administration website to the jQuery javascript library

This means that my own javascript library code has been removed, replaced, and improved!

The site itself doesn't use very much javascript - there are a couple of places where focus is set to a couple of elements, but other than that we're only talking about:

• Adding tags to articles, blog entrys, & polls
• Looking at the tag cloud
• Using the messaging system

Still there are a couple of enhancements that I've got planned which will make the site neater and more featureful for those users who've chosen to enable javascript in their browsers.

Here's my list of previous javascript usage - out of date now that I've basically chosen to use jQuery for everything.

ObQuote: Short Circuit.