Spun

My poor, old and few Firefox extensions are falling into disrepair. I’ll have to revisit these tutorials to get myself and them back up to speed.

I was really sad to miss Simon Willison’s Javascript tutorial at ETech this week, but happily he’s posted all his slides and detailed notes. Thanks, Simon! Definitely gonna brush up on the Javascript with this.

A few Ajax links I’ve been hoarding:

• Ajax Tutorial: Ajax What Is It Good For?
• 24 ways: Edit-in-Place with Ajax
• Mastering Ajax, Part 1: Introduction to Ajax
• Mastering Ajax, Part 2: Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and Ajax
• Mastering Ajax, Part 3: Advanced requests and responses in Ajax

Updated with one more link.

Somewhat old news that I found myself looking up tonight: database schemas for tags, ranging from stuffing keywords into a giant field to 2NF to 3NF.

Being the good database girl that I am, I tend toward third normal form (the last example, which involves 3 tables), but enforcing cascading deletes to trash orphaned tags would be a lot of more work for the app. At the other end of the spectrum, the single table solution seems insane (aren’t LIKE’s generally a no-no?), but at one point when Matt suggested this at Kinja and I consequently almost passed out, after some debate I realized there might be times this would fit best. (Note to self: there is never One True Way.) Maybe in media res, and the 2 table solution is best.

Anyway, a good reference for Web 2.0 taggy apps getting built out there.

I didn’t know about 4 of these. The vertical alignment with CSS and image replacement seem particularly useful.

The CPAN for Javascript, JSAN seems to offer a whole lot of useful Javascript code for download. An interesting bit in the FAQ:

[The Javascript] people seem to fall into two camps. The first are people who consider themselves programmers or application developers. They like JSAN because it allows you to develop in an application style. Thinking about modular components is important in software design. The second group of people consider JavaScript a scripting language, something you write small things in.

I’ve tended toward the ’something that you write small things in,’ but then I saw Gmail and Google Maps, and I changed my mind.

Developer Pete Freitag lists more than 30 “cheat sheets” for developers, ranging from HTML to SQL to version control. Personally I’m always headed over to Web Monkey’s Special Characters reference myself.