I have been a proponent of the Get Clicky web statistics since they first came out. They have been constantly improving them since day one, and I have enjoyed every update. One improvement that I especially liked were two menus in the top right. One that lists each of your websites being monitored by GetClicky so you can quickly jump between them, and one to change the date of the stats you’re currently viewing (if you’re only looking at a single day).

These menus currently only activate when you click them. Well, the arrow is there and it so nicely indicates to me that it should be a dropdown. So I wrote up a script to copy to onclick event to the onmouseover. This may be outdated pretty soon but it is one of my first scripts and it gives me a little joy each time I use it.

You’re going to need Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension and of course Site Statistics (available free) at Get Clicky.

So without further ado:
Greasemonkey Script to turn Clicky Menus into Mouseovers

Some recent fun with JavaScript at work and a co-workers really neat Greasemonkey script for Revealing Experts Exchange comments propelled me to write this very simple script. Mine pales in comparison to CoderJoe’s EE script and his knowledge of JavaScript and the DOM are quite vast. I consider this a first step into some individual JavaScript coding.

I just came up with something fun. Sotd - Script of the Day. Whenever I find/make a good script I will try to include it here, with the tag, and some fun content to work around it. Today’s script is the simple task of converting an entire file to uppercase. To standardize solutions I will say the current file is in.txt and we want the output file to go to out.txt. Here goes…

This simple task came from a question posted on Experts Exchange in the Scripting zone. Specifically Perl, however I putzed around with Perl and couldn’t quickly figure out what my print uc($_); was doing wrong, so I moved on to try my luck with Ruby. One minute without a need to look up any functions and 30 seconds of it not realizing I was still in the irb… and I had my Ruby solution:

> ruby -e "puts File.read('in.txt').upcase" > out.txt
> ruby -ne 'puts $_.upcase' < in.txt > out.txt

Which helped me produce the perl solution:
> perl -ne 'print uc' in.txt > out.txt

But I figured there had to be an easier way. I decided to manipulate tr///, transliterate, to convert lowercase characters to uppercase with the following one-liner piping the input file through tr and redirecting the output:

> cat in.txt | tr a-z A-Z > out.txt

I was pretty happy with it. How would you have done it?

As a personal project I started designing a website this April. Until then I had been using open source designs as the basis for all of my websites. Don’t get me wrong, I am fluent with XHTML/CSS/JS its just I lack the image editing skills and creative juices to design websites that are up to my caliber and liking.

That is up until this week, when I released –>Renderize<-. Some may remember that I designed the layout and style one weekend a few months ago and that I posted about it. Well I spent a number of weekends developing a custom backend so that I can manipulate nearly every portion of the site... your basic content management system. So Renderize is fully capable of being a "blog" and I have decided to commit myself to weekly postings on it.

Oh, and I don't bother with supporting IE on a website that I am going to use almost exclusively. The site should work in IE7, but I know there will be problems in IE6. I should point out that Safari and Firefox render the site perfectly, and that makes me more then happy.

However the posts contained at Renderize are not going to be web development content. Any suggestions of that will soon be removed from Renderize's content, as I have decided to keep my programming and developer posts on this blog because I have already built up a number of links and content at this blog, it would be a shame to duplicate or move the blog elsewhere. Not to mention the completeness of WordPress is pretty nice. Renderize will host my more personal blogging articles, for instance my weekly activities and personal events. Less likely to interest the techies that hopefully subscribe/visit this site.

Renderize does give me a chance to practice implementing many website features, and thus giving me an opportunity to blog about them. For instance I developed the RSS generator for Renderize, and I may very well discuss that in one of my programming blogs here. I have a sandbox to play and experiment with and some pride in having actually sitting up straight and making something happen.

Some final comments:

• Developing on a Mac (in TextMate) is awesome
• Building a framework for your own personal website is super cool
• Turning a Concept into a Reality is way more impressive then just suggesting the Concept

So thanks for reading, check out the blog and leave a comment here if you like it!