GreaseMonkey, Textile, cool Javascript

This is a geekburst of an entry, but this stuff builds up, and can hurt one’s bookmarks unless blogged regularly.

Yesterday I had a look at GreaseMonkey, a nifty FireFox extension which lets you set up javascript scripts that run automatically whenever pages from a certain site or sites are loaded. If that made your eyes glaze over, feel free to skip this entry. However, if you are still here, you probably want to look at this repository of GreaseMonkey scripts. Some of these are just little things to fix annoyances like a site with articles that are too narrow, or (to give an example of one of the two default scripts that come with the extension) transform plain text URLs into working links. The one I got excited about, geekishly enough, is the Javascript Textile one.

What this does is add a button next to any text area that will convert any Textile markup to HTML, using only Javascript. The reason I’m interested in this is that, back when I was using Movable Type, I had a bunch of entries that used their Textile formatting plug-in, and ever since moving to WordPress, that text has been messed up. The messed-up entries start in February 2003, with (fittingly enough) an entry titled Installed MT-Textile. My point is that now I can go back and fix them with a click.
Or so goes the plan.

Sort-of unrelated, I ran across JavaScript O Lait, an interesting Javascript library with a strong focus on AJAX (communcation with the server through Javascript, without requiring a page reload). It has modules for XML-RPC as well as JSON-RPC, which messages are expressed in JSON (the syntax used for Javascript data structures) instead of the much heavier (and parse-intensive) XML.

Geekish, I said.