I’m moving all my business and work related content there and will be actually taking posts down off this site and reposting things there. I’ve also made new pages for and updated many of my wordpress plugins there.

From now on, business and programming related content will go there, and when I am ready to start posting on literature, history, philosophy and related topics again, the new content will be posted here.

I’ve had to let a few of my personal projects like AJAXed WordPress fall to the wayside as I had too many other things dividing my time into itsy-bitsy little fragments.

Things are slowing down now and the craziness of the past year or two has begun to ebb, so eventually, I’m going to start posting here again, but for now, if you read the website for WordPress related stuff, head over to my business website. And heck, if you need some web development done too, I’m pretty sure you won’t have a hard time finding a nice contact form.

Thank you for your understanding.

P.S. Don’t you hate posts like this? Me too!

AJAX - it

I wanted to see how small you could make a fully functional AJAX script that worked cross-browser and degraded gracefully, so I went through an old custom AJAX script and made it as small as I possibly could. In the resulting AJAX scripts, the post version is 410 characters and the GET version is only 359 characters long. The scripts are fully functional and accept the following parameters: URL, DATA (in string form), and ELEMENT (to update).

The scripts could be a little smaller, but it would really kill readability.

“Get” AJAX Script

function a(l,d,u){
try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
if(r){
r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}
r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);r.send(d);
}
}

“Post” AJAX Script

function b(l,d,u){
try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();} catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');} catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
if(r){
r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML=r.responseText;}}
r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');r.send(d);
}
}

Combined AJAX Script

This combined script also accepts a fourth parameter ‘p’ that should evaluate true if the data is to be sent by post.

function a(l,d,u,p){
try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
if(r){
r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}
if(p){r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');}else{r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);}
}
}

Demo: (Sorry but you will have to go to the full page so the JavaScript is loaded.)
Click here to see the POST HTML of the homepage
Click here to see the GET HTML of the homepage
(they are the same)

Oder, ich bin ein gummi Bär; ich bin ein gummi Bär.

All right, all right. Back to your regularly scheduled broadcasting.

This website is officially not running beta software now, so yay!

[geek]I upgraded after it was released for only 10 – 30 minutes. That has to be a record.[/geek]

What do you have to do? Nothing much, just turn your lights off for an hour when 8pm rolls around. I’m planning on hitting my circuit-breaker for a total blackout, but you don’t have to go that far. Want to participate? Head over to the Earth Hour website for more information.

Now this is one of those “make a lot of publicity but not have much of a real effect” events, so not even the organizers would argue that this would save the world, so don’t worry about that part of it. However, these little things do add up, and if you can turn off your lights one night a year and still survive, why shouldn’t you be able to do it a little more often? Why allow one step to remain one step?

A quick note on the event:

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagshipsAtlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

I haven’t decided yet, but I think that I may even shut down the website for the hour. Maybe, I don’t know. (Oh and a big hat tip to ecogeek )

But, what happens when both are you?