Being able to check if website adverts were blocked is of some importance. As browser plugins such as AdBlock Plus and the likes are getting better all the time, less and less of your adverts get served up. Hence, my simple solution that can try and recover some of the lost revenue.

Google adwords code can be wrapped into a plain DIV tag without a set width/height, letting any content injected into it by Google dictate its size. Through a basic Element prototype shortcut, called Element.adCheck(), you can check if the size has remained less than expected (aka, the AD got blocked).

Element.implement({
    adCheck: function(options) {
        var options = $merge({
            delay: 3000,
            message: "<center>It looks as if my Adwords did not display<br />I am just a programmer that needs to feed their hungry child and wife, please disable AdBlock or whatever clever advert blocking software you are running on my site.</center>",
            minHeight: 20,
            minWidth: 20
        }, options);

        this.store("timer", (function() {
            var coords = this.getCoordinates();
            if (coords.height.toInt() < options.minHeight || coords.width < options.minWidth) {
                this.set("html", options.message).fade(0, 1)
            }
        }).delay(options.delay, this));
        return this;
    }
});

// check it for a div with id="as":
$("as").adCheck();

// check it for all divs with class 'myads'
$$("div.myads").adCheck({message: 'please disable adblock'});

// use alternative adverts instead
$("as").adCheck({message:"<a href='/signup.php'><img src='/img/signupbanner.gif'>"});

To run this, you need mootools 1.2+ core only. You could also extend the above code to .pass() a function callback so you can execute a proper ‘onAdvertFailed’ event.

Just a thought, but wouldn’t it be nicer if AdSense could serve adverts through JSONP that you can parse and embed clientside? It won’t be mainstream but it could really screw with current AdBlocking methods…

Just found this enjoyable collection of javascript statements that don’t make any sense, such as:

"string" instanceof String; // false.
[] == false; // true
"" == false; // true
null == false; // false, that's more like it
typeof null // object
null === Object // false

for these and more WTF moments in javascript, head over to wtfjs.com.

We’re shortly due to hire a new lamp/javascript developer at work and I just came across a very interesting post by Nicholas C. Zakas of Yahoo and O’Reilly fame. Although his requirements are probably a bit excessive (considering the enterprise level he’s at), I think there are some good ideas – definitely worth a read if you ever want to partake in the ‘big time’. Link here. Another interesting post explaining this javascript test offers some great insights into the workings of ECMA / javascript.

If you find the test by Dmitry Baranovsky easy to cope with, have a go at this one by Juriy Zaytsev of Prototype core dev team, some nasties there but it’s laced with knowledge of the inner workings of javascript. Is it fair to expect somebody you are interviewing to solve these, that’s a different subject…

This was supposed to be my Friday Fun post but it got to where it’s at on the following Monday instead. Having never tackled sprite animation before, this has been a learning experience anyway (on the principles of animation also).

I think the result is fairly adequate – a moving lemming in a world that changes atmospheric effects dependent on the time of day, complete with parallax-like effect relative as counter to the lemming’s movement.

Oh, yes. The lemming can also be quite moody–hates being bothered. Which is fine, you can blow him up too. Enjoy and click below:

P.S. This will feature as the header of fragged.org’s new wordpress theme which is almost completed now. So, a little taster of things to come…
P.P.S. Thanks to crisp for the original DHTML lemmings and to holy.pt for his vigorous testing and advice.

Just pulled out the old textSnow class foer 1.11 and rewrote it for 1.2.4. Anyway, head over to the demo page, it has all the info you need.

Here’s a novel idea (stolen from AppDen‘s Twitter feed fetch class) – extend the mootools-more’s JSONP class and setup some quick and easy geolocation lookups through pidgets.com and YQL (yahoo query language).

Here they are, 3 mini classes. First one uses the client’s IP address (or an optional ip supplied by options) to fetch geolocation info from http://geoip.pidgets.com/. The second instance fetches extended information on a place / city by location from Yahoo’s geoplaces DB, including things like local district, council authority, county and so forth, something that I find useful when creating quick signup forms for users and PAF lookups are not in the budget. The final class was simple test to fetch relevant timezone info of any latitude + longitude combination. It offers local time, offset from GMT or DST etc, but nothing that Date.get(“gmtoffset”) can’t accomplish anyway).

Request.geoLocation = new Class({
    // gets basic info such as country and latitude data
    Extends: Request.JSONP,
    options: {
        ip: $empty(), // default is user but you can lookup anything.
        url: "http://geoip.pidgets.com/?format=json",
    },
    initialize: function(options) {
        this.parent(options);
        if (this.options.ip.length)
            this.options.url = this.options.url += "&ip=" + this.options.ip
    },
    success: function(data, script) {
        this.parent(data, script);
    }
});

Request.getPlaceInfo = new Class({
    // return json data with extended information of a place / location.
    Extends: Request.JSONP,
    options: {
        url: "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select * from geo.places where text='{location}'&format=json",
    },
    initialize: function(location, options) {
        this.parent(options);
        this.options.url = this.options.url.substitute({location: location});
    },
    success: function(data, script) {
        this.parent(data, script);
    }
});

Request.timeZone = new Class({
    // return local timezone related date from geo coordinates
    Extends: Request.JSONP,
    options: {
        url: "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20xml%20where%20url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Fws.geonames.org%2Ftimezone%3Flat%3D{latitude}%26lng%3D{longitude}'&format=json"
    },
    initialize: function(latitude, longitude, options){
        this.parent(options);
        this.options.url = this.options.url.substitute({latitude: latitude, longitude: longitude});
    },
    success: function(data, script) {
        this.parent(data, script);
    }
});

Here is a quick example of how it can be used on a form. Note you need mootools-more with JSONP for it to work.

This is not a tool you can rely on for customer-facing development, but I found it invaluable nevertheless. jsPrintSetup is a small fireFox add-on that hands you a controlling object in javascript. You get FULL access to any print-related function you could think of: list printers, select default printers, print silently, control spool, headers… There’s just too much to mention. Very useful when coding a CMS that needs to print specific things to specific printers (for example, invoices on printer #1 and labels on printer #2).

Here is an example that fetches a list of printers and remembers the user’s preference for future use:

// only do something if the plugin is live
if ($type(jsPrintSetup)) {
    var printers = jsPrintSetup.getPrintersList().split(","); // get a list of installed printers

    // no print dialogue boxes needed
    jsPrintSetup.setSilentPrint(true);

    // create a dropdown
    var printList = new Element("select", {
        id: "printerList",
        events: {
            change: function() {
                Cookie.write("defaultPrinter", this.get("value"), {
                    path: "/admin/",
                    duration: 365
                });

                // save the new printer selection
                jsPrintSetup.setPrinter(this.get("value"));
            }
        }
    }).injectTop($("printSetup"));

    // get default by preference if any
    var defaultPrinter = Cookie.read("defaultPrinter");

    printers.each(function(el) {
        new Element("option", {
            value: el,
            text: el,
            selected: (defaultPrinter == el) ? "selected" : false
        }).inject(printList);

    });

    // attach an event that prints from an element called goPrint
    $("goPrint").addEvents({
        click: function() {
            jsPrintSetup.print();
        }
    });
}

I was browsing around the internet and came across Iconza by turbomilk. As it seemed rather nice and my Framework Detector Firefox add-on sniffed out mootools, I had a look at the source.

It uses what looks like a colour picker plugin for mootools called mooRainbow. Nice to have in your toolkit, you never know. Iconza’s png trickery is not too shabby either, nice site (as you’d expect from Turnomilk anyway).

Just a quick request – if you go and use snippets of javascript code from this site, great, it’s what it’s there for.

Just please, please, don’t copy and paste my google analytics javascript into your pages as well, it kind of messes up my stats. Thanks in advance.

It has always annoyed me as a user when having to strain my eyesight and having to type weird letters or numbers in order to prove I am a human. The practice is known as ‘captcha’ and dates back a while now. Regretfully, nothing much has changed aside from the ability of the bots to OCR better – we still need to read some obtuse characters.

This is why I wrote a javascript mootools captcha class called hOOmanTest – making the whole ‘prove you are not a bot’ a lot easier to stomach. Regretfully, it has no degradation as it relies on drag and drop, but you can use reCaptcha inside your target div as the fallback and have the class apply an .empty() before populating it, providing the upper layer.

*edit*: I really do hope it helps somebody, here is the first site that uses it out there–in a quotation webform on the cleaning 4u site, click the free quote banner to view.