Update: Added the check to make sure the input is empty before showing the overlayed label the first time.

Tonight I made it to my second Austin JavaScript Meetup and I left thinking "Dammit! Why have I been missing these?!" Well, I know why but the point is, I'm there now and plan on making the rest of them.

Since Austin has opened up their rail "system" I have really embraced mass transit. I happen to be in the sweet spot of living 3 miles from the park and ride and working 3 blocks from the downtown station. However, I noticed that for Austin being such a tech savvy town, the mass transit mobile app situation is awful. Sure, Google Maps work great if you want to get from one place to another and don't know how to get there, but for people who know the routes and just want to see when the next train is running, you have to go to Cap Metro's site. Their site leaves a little to be desired, especially when viewed on a mobile device. So, I decided to do something about it.

When I mentioned the GLGUI Toolbox repo I failed to mention some of the content already in it. I'm gonna give a quick rundown of the two prototype methods I contributed.

I had some spare time today, a really nasty plugin I had written for jQuery a while back to do character count downs and a desire to play with the widget factory. Let's get it on!

I really like Gist, a lot. They are full on git repos and as such have version control, remote updating, all of the things you would expect out of a github repo including most of the social aspects. They also have the best syntax highlighting I have seen. Yes, there are other libs that do it in various languages, but I really like theirs and I like having my code in 1 place.

Recently I had to learn a little bit about CORS (cross origin resource sharing). I had sites on different domains I had to get data in between. I like to try to be forward thinking, so when I learned about a better option than JSONP, I jumped all over it. Nicholas Zakas explains is very well on his article about CORS. Like all the other new, fun technologies, it's not supported by all older browsers. So I had to find a way to be forward thinking but have a fallback. What I ended up with is a CORS xhr that falls back to JSONP if CORS is not natively supported.

A week ago (8-16-11) at Austin JavaScript I gave a presentation about the basics of JavaScript and jQuery. In case anyone is interested I have made the slides available.