Less Talk, More Do

I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

• March 31st, 2011

  Announcing Typo.js: Client-side JavaScript Spellchecking

  In which I spend lots of time on something that will eventually be made obsolete by a Chrome extension API.

• January 30th, 2010

  Uploading form data and files with JavaScript (Mozilla)

  One problem I stumble across occasionally in writing Firefox extensions is properly uploading form data that includes a file – that is, assembling the POST request in JavaScript while still maintaining the sanctity of any file or string data. You can’t just do this: var request = "--boundary\r\n some text\r\n--boundary" + fileBytes + "\r\n--boundary--"; I [...]

• November 16th, 2007

  Facebook Image-to-Email: Broken Again

  I am aware that the Facebook Image-to-Email Firefox extension is (once again) broken, and given that version 1.1 installed on Firefox 2.0.0.8 was working, and now version 1.1 installed on Firefox 2.0.0.8 is not working, it has to be due to a change that Facebook made. The problem is that I can’t discern any relevant [...]

• September 11th, 2007

  Convert Facebook e-mail images to actual e-mail links

  The massively popular social network Facebook uses images to display the e-mail addresses of your friends, making it impossible to copy the e-mail address or click on it to send e-mails to your friends, thus making Facebook’s own proprietary in-site messaging system more attractive to its users. Yesterday, Gervase Markham posited that it should be [...]

• July 8th, 2007

  Pownce has a big security problem

  Kevin Rose’s latest project, Pownce, has a glaring security problem on its front page. The JavaScript that Pownce uses in its login form can reveal your password in plain text on the screen. Here are the steps to reproduce the problem in Firefox: Login to Pownce via http://www.pownce.com/. Allow Firefox to save your login information [...]

• May 5th, 2007

  Extending JavaScript

  There are a lot of common programming algorithms that are built into various languages as functions: checking if an array contains a certain item, trimming a string, mapping a function to an array, etc. JavaScript doesn’t have a lot of these built-ins, but with prototypical inheritance, it’s easy enough to add them. I’m thinking it [...]

• May 4th, 2007

  Video Tutorial: The JavaScript Programming Language

  Yahoo!’s video of Douglas Crockford’s The JavaScript Programming Language lecture is definitely the best overview of JavaScript that I’ve ever seen. (The first part is embedded below, and the remaining 3 parts are linked after that.) I saw it a while back, but it’s been getting a fair amount of press in the social media [...]