Web 2.1

I do marvel at the ingenuity of spammers sometimes. Despite being crap programmers, they do have a knack for coming up with new ways to deliver their poisonous junk. It's almost enough to make me consider life of crime.

After placing a job advert on Gumtree, we (my current employer and I) received a touching email from someone intersted in our junior developer role. Clicking their portfolio link took us to a spammer's "search" portal complete with gambling site pop-ups.

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My brother just launched a new personal project of his, consisting of two web sites; ifeellondon.com and ifeelnyc.com. The idea, in a nutshell, is that you browse for activities in your home city by how you feel, rather than what you might want to do, or where you might want to go.

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This tool is based on a full JavaScript parser that is part of a much bigger plan. I won't go into that just yet, but along the way I'm going to be releasing useful tools like this as they come about. It's useful to have some short term goals to keep up morale and ensure that the framework is working well.

> Try it here: Obfuscate and minify your JavaScript code

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I've updated my JavaScript parser to include full Unicode support.
Check out the test interfaces for:
» Full parser;
» Code highlighting.

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If you learn a programming language it is unlikely that you will read the formal language specification that defines all the laws of the syntax. You may never read it at all. It is more useful to learn by example, or at least topic-by-topic. However, a mere ten years after writing my first few lines of JavaScript, I read the ECMAScript standard and it threw up some things I did not know.

There are many things that you can write in JavaScript that are perfectly valid syntax, but that you probably never will write. Here are a few that raised an eyebrow or two.

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Publicreative have just launched a new version of MTV's Best Show Ever website. It's largely a user-contributed video site, with the added attraction that your clip could wind up on MTV.

I was heavily involved in this project as a back end developer and "web master" (for want of a better word). I may write about this project in more depth later, but for now there it is - Check it out!

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Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

I recently watched the internet film, Zeitgeist. After which I was burning to write my opinions here, but unfortunately that's not really what my blog is about, so instead I turn my attention to the internet as Information Technology. At least this is what IT stood for when I was at school, but ironically this was a time when I was much more likely to turn to books for information. More to the point, I was likely to go to much greater lengths to find out facts than doing a quick Google.

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I finally found a spare few hours to implement Automatic Semicolon Insertion into my JavaScript Parser.
Check out the test interface here.

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I am pretty new to Flash Media Server, but on my current project I have been charged with setting it up. Today, I ran into a thoroughly unpleasant problem, possibly a bug, which I thought I would share.

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Despite the glorious sunshine this week, my week off, I managed to put some time into my pet project of developing a full JavaScript parser written in 100% native PHP. Actually, I've been developing a generic parser suite for some time, and using it to build a full JavaScript parser was my ultimate goal to be satisfied that it all works and is powerful enough to be useful. I've written a bunch of blogs about developing a parser generator in PHP, (click "parsing" to do a tag search).

Before I start wittering on,
Click here to play with the online example of JParser

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