Patrick Tulskie

I decided to start writing a little series of articles based on the lessons I’ve learned in writing code the uses twitter, using twitter itself, and just generally getting the most out of it.  This is the first one, and maybe there will be more depending on how I like it.

The Problem - Why You Should Care

Other sites that you pull content from are not always going to be reliable.  They could be down, running slow, or some other possible problem.  If you are using something like twitter to display your status on your site but you have a lot of other content you want people to see then it would be wise to use client-side scripting to get the content.  You might be saying in your head “Oh but I have this sweet PHP script that does that for me.” but you should tell that voice in your head to shut up and just listen.

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I won’t sit here and proclaim myself to be some god of Grease Monkey but I do know a thing or two about Java Script.  Basically, for those of you who are clueless as to what Grease Monkey is, it’s a plugin for Firefox that allows you to manipulate certain pages you visit using Java Script.  Now that we know what it is and have tons of ideas flowing through our heads, let’s just do something kinda cool.

Today we’re going to beat up on certain gallery pages that use images of the format “imageName.sized.jpg”.  What I mean by this is - we’re going to take the page (which is usually filled with junk) and replace everything with just the full size image and the caption.

Let’s get some assumptions out of the way:
You know SOME Java Script, the site you’re visiting also has the non-sized images in the same directory as the sized images, and you don’t care what else is on the web page.  We’re also assuming there is only one caption with no “id” and we only have a style class to work with.

Ok?  Ok.  Let’s go.

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Dawned on me the other day that this blog was kind of a pain in the eyes to read.  That’s what I get for not taking the time to make my own theme for Wordpress.

What I did was I made most of the fonts on the page black, but this had some negative affects in terms of not being able to read the text on some of the black spots on the page.  I’m working on it, I know.  Just want to let everyone know I’m aware.

One of the other things that was pretty annoying was the slow page load time when my twitter status is loading.  I handled that with some PHP to verify the URL of the page you’re looking at and I also moved the javascript to the very bottom of the site before the end of the body tag.  This makes sure that only pages where the twitter status is shown will actually load the javascript AND it also makes sure that the rest of the page loads in a timely manner so you don’t need to wait around for my status if you want to read something else.

Just some usability metrics that I had to handle and I thought I’d mention them.  I’ll be doing another article on the PHP used to handle the twitter status probably later on this week.