Strap on the Feedbag

The newest addition to the toys page is feedMachine, a one-two punch of JavaScript goodness that makes dealing with feeds a little more fun.

The mojo behind the scenes is actually two objects; the first, WarRocketAjax, does an Ajax request to whatever URL it is given. It does a GET by default, but you can tell it to POST, if that's your kink.

WarRocketAjax is overridden by FeedMachine, which gets a feed (RSS and Atom both work) and writes it to a JS object that you can do with what you may. There's a demo file included in the zip archive.

I'm doing an increasing amount of OOP work in my JavaScript coding. Either I'm evolving, or it's time to seek professional help.

Stay on the scene

We've just added another piece of mellow gold to the toys page -- this time it's urlMachine, a bit of JavaScript nastiness that will take any URL and make it into an object that can be queried, modified, and loved up. Enjoy.

Electric Boogaloo

We've just released the second version of tiny, the cutest lil' CMS you ever did see, and we can't wait to see what you think of it. In response to your excellent feedback (thanks again, incidentally -- the response has been overwhelming and wonderful), the needs of some sites we're working on, and our inability to stop tinkering with it, tiny 2 has a number of improvements, including sortable tables in the administration view and database creation/updates through migrations (no more create.sql, unless you're into that sort of thing -- freak).

The most noticeable change in the new version is the replacement of the old feeds paradigm with a spiffy bit of mojo we call widgets. A widget can be a snippet of text (Redcloth, naturally) or an RSS or Atom feed, and you can have as many as you like. Now, instead of allowing just one RSS/Atom feed per site and optionally displaying that feed on one or more of your pages, you now have the ability to show and order the content across your pages like the badass we both know you are.

You'll also notice that the mojo to parse and display feeds is exposed through the tiny.js file that helps power the site; this means that slick Javascript coders will be able to get and show feed content anywhere (and any way) they want by extending what's already there. Rock on.

As always, the best way to grab the new version of tiny is by hitting the Subversion repository, but there's also a .zip file available over at the main site.