Monthly Archives:: October 2009

Most cases where you find String.substr() in the wild are to check if a given string begins with a certain other string. Be it checking for a prefix or sorting out zipcodes that begin with certain numbers. And because code readability is a good thing (really, it is important), it would be nice to have a String.beginsWith() method. Or, because of dojo love, a dojo.string.beginsWith() method.

Consider the following code:

var nearbyZipcodes = dojo.filter(givenZipcodes,function(zipcode){
    return dojo.string.beginsWith(zipcode,'12');
});

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Though many people would disagree, I for one like to use fieldsets to structure complex forms. Even better do I like fieldsets that are collapsible.

As there is no such fieldset with dojo, I decided to write my own widget. While doing so, I learnt an interesting lesson…

First, I wrote it pretty simple, inheriting the widget from dijit._Widget and dijit._Templated. It had a toggle button next to its legend, which could be clicked. The toggle was a simple display none/block change.
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There is still some traffic coming in from people who are searching for how to deal with the safari popup blocker. So I thought it might be nice to also tell what you can do about it – as most people want solutions, not backgrounds…

So, here you go:

It’s pretty simple, really. What to do? Well, call window.open() while the popup blocker still allows it, and store a reference to the window object. Then, later, do with it what you want. That is, changing the location in most cases.
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Or: Still ending the ga.js wait…

It has become quiet here the last weeks – due to an awesome trip to Italy. Returning home, I decided to put Google Analytics on this page.

As I always hate waiting for the ga.js to load while visiting websites, I wanted a mechanism to delay the load of it. Why this is a good idea has been discussed often enough elsewhere, so we take it as fact. Peter Higgins once wrote such a wrapper for dojo, and as of dojo 1.3, it’s officially included in dojox (see Alex Russel’s post). But this WordPress theme runs jQuery, and I didn’t want to have two frameworks in one website – so I searched for something that did the job for jQuery.
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