I have had one myself, spending quality time off the net with friends and relatives. I am somewhat happy about ending up on a really high latency modem link yesterday, which made me attack an area of my template I had sort of put off for some time when there would be less "instant gratification" tweaks on offer. When the opportunity finally did arise, chance would have it I put down the tedious work necessary to make the kind of PayPal Donate hack I have been pondering longingly since I saw Jesse Ruderman's take on it. I like how it came out, especially how most of it translates to other languages, as you pick them in the flag menu above. (Chances are slim I'll understand comments in any other languages than English, Swedish and other Scandinavian languages or French, though.)
An hour or two went into bringing the GVisit JSON feeds up to speed with the slew of additional ideas I got after having made my first GVisit application running atop the initial GVisit JSON feed I tossed up. I added things like supplying what little meta info is available about the account, and optionally filtering out only visitors before or after a given time and/or capping the number of results returned, supplying a JSONP style callback argument, and perhaps a few other bits and pieces too. It will be fun writing an article about how to do creative things with this.
The days just before Christmas, I did some serious digging about in the Google Maps (v28) internal APIs, hoping to come up with a way of adding Google Maps style buttons without duplicating every bit of code from the widget layouting code to the cross browser image and transparency handling. I also found just how deeply that code is buried in the unexposed internals, and much to my dismay noted that no, that isn't doable as some needed bits are hidden in a private GMapsNamespace. Well, relatively speaking, anyway. As wiser men than me have noted in the past, in a language sporting an
eval() mechanism, most problems, this one included, can be solved in really ugly backwards ways.I actually spent a few hours writing an ugly RegExp based "hook in and forcefully expose needed APIs" beast, but I was a few cc:s of blood sugar too low to get it to work properly, so I put that on ice for the moment. It was an interesting exercise, though; I think I will complete, show off and and publish the results, in some hope of getting benevolent Google Maps engineers to expose more of the goodies that actually are useful to outside world developers too, just as are presently the exposed but officially undocumented WMS APIs. I wonder if publishing fan documentation of the not yet covered (and hence in a way perhaps not considered final) parts of the APIs is considered breaking DMCA, or something silly like that.
It probably would be if Google referred to their obfuscation as obfuscation, or "copy protection" rather than "compression", which they presently do. Other good hackers out there -- Joaquín Cuenca Abela of Panoramio -- actually seem to spend quality brain time on doing the same. Also with the in my opinion very misguided notion of achieving fewer bits on the wire by compromising code readability. (Read my commentary on the post for some more detailed enlightenment to this stance -- or, in short: gzip does better compression than you do, non-destructively.) Fortunately, though, Joaquín aims higher, and his tools seem to have a good possibility of becoming something really useful, by way of presently missing parts in the javascript toolchain.
The javascript linker (in short: analyze what library methods you use, and their full dependencies, include those and toss the rest) he is poking at might be a nice way of lowering the load time impact of library code usage, until The Coming of The Great Library, to apply Civilization terms to the web world.
