Chanel’s Blog

If you needed a reason to switch to Google Chrome, I just found one more. Go to your chrome history by typing Ctrl+H or going through Tools -> History. Type in any text you remember reading throughout your viewing history and chrome will do a regular google search through your history. I’ve always wanted to build this feature into Firefox, but now I don’t have to. Now the only thing chrome needs for me to be a full convert is Tree Style Tabs.

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I recently read a Wired article where people achieved success losing weight because Weight Watchers is basically an RPG. One game/exercise that I often do is to see how many lines of code or components I can write without any errors. It’s hard to quantify but my record so far as about 200 lines of Javascript/AJAX code. It was kind of cheating because I was basically re-using Javascript and backend PHP code that had been thoroughly tested. Overall, this is a pretty good method to increase the amount of code you can hold in your head and attempts to reduce the relying of debugging tools in favor of self/mental debugging.

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Browsers do a lousy job of providing an interface to the HTML document. The DOM is supposed to be that interface but it is horribly slow, and clunky. Traversing the DOM tree extensively is one of the sure-fire way to slow down your site. In an effort to help out Javascript coders, the DOM does have functions like getElementsByTagName, getElementsByClassName and getElementsByName, but they do not all work across all browsers. This why you should create a function called getElementsByID:

var groupCache = {};
function getElementsById(id){
  if(!groupCache[id]){
    groupCache[id] = [];
  }
  var nodes = groupCache[id];
  for(var x=0; x<nodes .length; x++){
    if(nodes[x].id != ""){
      nodes.splice(x, 1);
      x--;
    }
  }
  var tmpNode = document.getElementById(id);
  while(tmpNode){
    nodes.push(tmpNode);
    tmpNode.id = "";
    tmpNode = document.getElementById(id);
  }
  return nodes;
}

Now whenever you want a collection of DOM objects, just give all of them the same id and call this function to grab an array of the objects you want. This is not the most ideal way and its actually a pretty big hack. But sometimes, speed is more important than form.

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