I seem to be making a lot of posts on Google this week.

Google just released a new browser plugin that lets you embed Google Earth into your website. Wonderful!

I think I’ll take a little time this weekend to play around with the API. I can think of one immediate use for this which I’d like to explore…

A really terrific idea was just posted today on Ajaxian.com, thanks to our friends at Google. It’s so bloody simple I’m kicking myself for not thinking of it.

Every time you visits a website that uses a JS library like jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, Scriptaculous or dojo, your web browser – not knowing any better – has to re-download it. Look around your temporary file folders and you’ll find copy after copy of Prototype, jQuery etc. all with ever-so-slightly different version numbers.

Enter Google’s Ajax Libraries API. Google now hosts the more common libraries (i.e. those mentioned above) and provides a simple API for importing a particular version into your script. This has the advantage of only forcing the web browser to download the files once for all website – which can substantially improve website response times (especially for those using the larger frameworks) – but also, it lets you forget about worrying about gzipping and minimizing the libraries: it’s all taken care of for you!

The obvious drawback is that we have to get further in bed with Google. So when they flip the “Evil” switch, we’re all basically just screwed. And on a less-paranoid-more-practical front, if the Google servers go down, so does your website.

I’ve just come back from spending the day at Nitobi, for their “Hack Day 3″. Basically it entailed sitting around in their gorgeous office in downtown Vancouver, eating pizza, drinking beer, chatting about software & programming with a bunch of other nerds. A day well spent by anybody’s standards. ;-)

At the end of the day we all gave presentations on what we’d been working on. Some interesting stuff. One chap did a 3D flash rendering of the Nitobi office space, which was bloomin’ cool – very nice to see what Flash is now capable of. Another guy did a cross-browser JS debugging tool offering functionality like Firebug or Venkman, only, well, cross-browser. Nice chap, too.

For my part, originally I’d intended to improve the jQuery version of my Smart Lists app to allow for more than one instance in a page (someone recently emailed me about it), but once I got there I figured it wasn’t terribly demo-able ["Hey look guys... no bug!" Yeah... perhaps not]. I also decided against working on the AIR version of generatedata.com since… I dunno, I just felt like I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than debug SQL Lite.

So, eyeballs intact, I added a few new features to Smart Lists:

• An (optional) second pagination set, so in case you have rather long page, you can include the << 1 2 3 >> at the bottom as well as the top.
• A “Num results” option to let you display the number of items found in the current selected flags.
• A “Show All” function that you can use in your page to list all content.
• Lastly, and by far the most cool, is the option to categorize your data with a second dropdown. e.g. if your list of data was houses for sale, you could have one dropdown for Area of Town, another for Type of house. Then, the user could select an option from each dropdown and view that specific item subset. [It's cooler than it sounds.]

Despite my staggeringly unclear presentation, I think people understood it – but I do rather wish I’d explained it’s extensibility a bit more. Virtually everything about the script is customizable. Oh well.

In the next week or two I’ll update the main script and jQuery version for these additions.

Ajaxian posted this interesting little nugget about “soft hyphens”. This splendid little idea has apparently always been in the HTML spec, but not supported by all browsers. The idea is that you can enter the characters: ­ in a string to suggest to the browser where to break the string, in case it’s too long to fit in an allotted space. Very nice!

Howdy folks. I’ve just released a new version of the RSV library (formerly just dubbed “JS Validation”). Here’s what’s new:

• the script is now available as a jQuery plugin and a Prototype extension as well as a standalone script, with custom documentation for each.
• it now uses a CSS class to highlight/de-highlight fields that fail the validation. This is a notable improvement over the former method of assigning styles directly to the style attribute (which could sometimes overwrite styles already on the fields)
• minor bug fix with computing leap years in the isValidDate function.

Learn more about the script here.

I’m back in Vancouver, but the house we’ve moved into is in extremely bad shape, so I’ll be busy renovating for the next week or two. Apologies to everyone who’s emailed, but I’m not going to be at my computer much…!