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Eventbug is a very handy plugin for Firebug that lets you see all event handlers attached to an element. Simply ‘inspect element’ on an element, and you can see all events in the right tab panel. In beta right now, but proving to be very handy already.

Added three new repositories on Github for JSON-related scripts i’ve been working on, with pretty self-explanatory titles :)

• csv2json : PHP script to convert CSV to JSON
• json2sql : PHP script to convert JSON to SQL statements
• xml2json : Python script to convert XML to JSON or the other way around

I had some problems matching dollar signs in PHP regexp’s:

$str = 'Bacon $ham eggs and $spam';
preg_match_all("|\$|", $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);

Gives

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] =>
        )
)

It does work when double escaping the $

preg_match_all("|\\$|", $str, $matches);

Gives

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => $
            [1] => $
        )

)

This problem occurs because PHP substitutes $variables in strings enclosed in “double quotes”. So, actually the problem can very easily be solved by just replacing double with single quotes:

preg_match_all('|\$\' $str, $matches);

Objective best practices for WordPress plugin development

Must-read thread for any WP plugin coders. I’ve written two suggestions, about using a template mechanism and about using classes and proper PHP5 OO-code.

Thanks to a Superuser question i asked a few weeks ago i discovered the wonderful iReader plugin for Google Chrome. It mimics Safari 5.0′s new Reader functionality almost to perfection (hopefully Apple won’t be pointing their copyright lawyers to this blogpost right now). The ‘Reader’ option in Safari gives you an uncluttered view of an article on a website without ads and nice fonts, a bit like Readability or Instapaper but with multi-page support.

It doesn’t quite render multi-page articles perfectly, such as the infamous Wired article on the death of the web. But Safari’s Reader doesn’t render that correctly too.

There’a also a beta version available for Firefox.

jQuery Mobile | jQuery Mobile

New version of jQuery targeted for mobile touch devices. Release date is somewhere end of this year.

Sorting in Javascript using the Array.sort() function doesn’t work how i thought it did:

var foo = [3, 4, 5, 2, 1];
foo.sort(function(a,b) {
    return a < b;
});
console.log(foo);

In Firefox this gives the result you expect ([1,2,3,4,5]), but in Chrome and Safari, it doesn't (and in IE too probably). When re-reading the spec at Mozilla's dev site i discovered why:

If compareFunction(a, b) is less than 0, sort a to a lower index than b. (…) If compareFunction(a, b) is greater than 0, sort b to a lower index than a.

So, the return value should not be true or false but -1 or 1. The example above should be written as:

foo.sort(function(a,b) {
    return a - b;
});