Huffduffer

HuffdufferHuffduffer

Why oh why haven’t I used this web-site before.

Since buying an iPod nano, a few years ago now, I've become an avid listener to podcasts. When I'm walking, cleaning, cooking or washing-up I'm listening to podcasts that I've subscribed to. Some feeds I've stuck with for years and listen to every show. Others I've unsubscribed from mainly due to the fact that there are only so many listening hours in the week and they started to pile up in iTunes.

Recently I've wanted to listen to the odd Boagworld podcast or I've found an interview in an MP3 file on a web-site that looks interesting. Before Huffduffer I would have to download the one show via the podcast section, then remember to delete the feed afterwards, or download the file manually, add it to iTunes, listen to it and then delete it.

Being a Web 2.0 stalker of longstanding I read a tweet from Jeremy Keith saying that he was huffduffing himself, which is considered illegal in some countries and is hardly a spectator sport. He was huffduffing the dConstruct ‘09 podcasts which I'd listened to in previous years.

After mentioning it 3 times and ‘it’ also being the title of this post, I'd better explain what it does.

Huffduffer allows you to create your own podcast stream using MP3’s that you've found on the internet. So, in my case, I'm surfing around web-sites and I find a download link to an MP3 file. All I need to do is use the bookmarklet to huffduff it. I have already subscribed to my feed in iTunes so the next time the feeds are refreshed the MP3 file will get downloaded.

It works in a such a way that anything is a podcast feed. You have your own feed, of items that you've huffduffed, you can subscribe to someones else’s feed, a feed of the most popular additions or a feed particular tags. If only there were more hours in the day to listen to it all.

Jeremy said that it was just a ‘scratch your own itch’ project and that it’s possibly too geeky to go mainstream. It’s certainly inspiring to see a niche site like this created just for the love of it.

DOM Scripting

DOM ScriptingDOM Scripting

  • Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
  • Jeremy Keith
  • Web Design

Over the last couple of years I've read many great books about web design and standards generally. How to keep the presentation layer separate from the mark-up etc. But I had never bought, or read for that matter, any books about JavaScript, until now.

I had used JavaScript at work a few years ago. I liked the immediacy of it, being a scripting language and not a compiled one, but I didn't like how fussy it was and what a pain it was to debug. Alert boxes seem fine at first until you have to put them in a loop. Then there was all that browser sniffing, that I had seen when I'd viewed the source of web sites, that all seemed tortuous.

The cover of the book mentions "unobtrusive JavaScript" which I thought meant that you would have your JavaScript in a separate file, that's pretty much a no-brainer, then you would just have 'onClick' event calls to your functions. Jeremy describes techniques that are much neater and cleaner than that. What he basically suggests is that you can have your JavaScript search down the DOM, finding a node with a specific class, then add dynamic effects to any of the child nodes underneath. One of the initial examples is a Gallery. Just a list if links pointing to images using 'a' tags. What the JavaScript does is find these tags and display the image underneath the list of links on the page. Even the position of the photo is generated by JavaScript.

One thing that he does keep mentioning is the fact that some browsers may not have support for JavaScript or that JavaScript has been disabled. In this case he says that, whatever the page does dynamically using JavaScript, it must also still do without JavaScript. Even if it doesn't look as swish or if it takes a page load to achieve.

The book covers pretty much everything you need to know to add some sparkle to your web sites. From basic JavaScript programming to AJAX and HIJAX. I managed to read it all away from the keyboard, but to get the most out of it you would have to work through the examples. A good book for someone who wants to know how to use JavaScript correctly and with the least fuss and excessive coding. Not a book for someone who just wants to add flying pink elephants to their homepage.

Extras

twitter