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.