Thanks to a clean patch from Sean Coates, I'm releasing v1.5 of JSONovich. It now supports code-folding. Great hack, Sean!

JSONovich has now emerged from the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox and is available to the masses: http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10122.

JSONovich is now up to version 0.6. Recent revisions have added the following functionality:

• Reads in JSON and converts to UTF-8 for some naive Unicode handling
• Wraps long lines at the right edge of the window
• Adds a check to see if a native JSON parsing library is already loaded (as will be the case in Firefox 3.1). Uses that library if so, otherwise loads the module included in JSONovich.
• Handles JSON syntax errors more gracefully. Used to eat bad data and display nothing, but syntax errors (from the JSON parser) are now surfaced.

I've also tossed the source up on code.google.com for version control.

In the meantime, those of you who are using JSONovich can help increase its exposure by heading over to its entry at addons.mozilla.org, logging in, downloading, rating, and reviewing the extension. Reviews and ratings help get extensions "promoted" from the sandbox to the public site, which provides the ability for automatic updates when new versions of the extension are released.

JSONovich is now in the "sandbox" over at addons.mozilla.org, where it will remain until it's been tested a bit more, and rated and reviewed by users. Until that point, it will be marked as "experimental" and will require users to login before they can download it. If any of you would like to give JSONovich a quick spin and rate/review it over at the Mozilla add-ons site, that would be solid. Once it's gotten a few reviews and I'm more comfortable about it working cross-platform and cross-version, I'll nominate it to be promoted.

Here's where it lives: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10122

Much obliged, folks. And thanks to those of you who have already downloaded it, installed it, tested it, left comments, or some combination thereof.

JSONovich is a Firefox extension that pretty-prints and colorizes JSON.

Feedback is welcome.

There must be a better way of viewing pretty-printed JSON from Firefox than this. (EDIT: Hail, JSONovich!)

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#!/usr/bin/env python
# ~/bin/jsonhandler.py 
# Take some JSON from a file or stdin, format it, output to a tempfile, 
# open in EDITOR
 
from __future__ import with_statement
import os
import sys
import simplejson
import tempfile
 
EDITOR = "/usr/bin/gedit"
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) == 2:
        # if invoked as jsonhandler.py {FILE}
        json = open(sys.argv[1])
    else:
        # if JSON is piped in (e.g., from Firefox, 
        # or cat {FILE} | jsonhandler.py)
        json = sys.stdin
    json = simplejson.load(json)
    # the with_statement is kind of gratuitous but I like it
    with open(tempfile.mktemp('.json'), 'w') as jsonfile:
        simplejson.dump(json, jsonfile, indent=4)
    # all of that and gedit doesn't even highlight JSON
    # I have emacs highlighting JSON but this generates a "stdin is not 
    # a tty" error, so EDITOR is not set to emacs
    # xemacs works a little better, but I need to click:
    # "Options > Syntax Highlighting > In this buffer" every time, despite 
    # saving to custom.el, so EDITOR is not set to xemacs
    # Very annoying!
    os.system("%s %s" % (EDITOR, jsonfile.name))

And then I set ~/bin/jsonhandler.py as the action for application/json in Edit | Preferences | Applications.

Yuck. Help?

I've posted a couple new tools during the past couple days. One is an update of Devon Smith's LinkPURL extension for Firefox 2.0.

The other is an ultra-lightweight WordPress plugin that embeds a linkpurl link tag for auto-discovery (so bookmarking agents can detect and grab the persistent URL rather than the impersistent URL up in the addressbar).

Based on a discussion in #code4lib earlier today, I realize that there are a lot of important questions, not to mention serious doubts, about persistent identifiers. I flip-flop on their utility myself, so I found the discussion very useful. (Thanks, edsu!) Maybe I'll write a post or two about persistent identifiers to flesh my thoughts out.

The Windows Script File, .wsf, allows one to mark-up in XML different blocks of scripting. One can, in effect, write a script hooking VBScript, JavaScript, and PerlScript together. This looks to be quite powerful for scripters, especially within the domain of systems administration. Often one knows one scripting language better than another, and even more commonly one may exploit the strengths of multiple languages. Imagine combining the ease of Windows operability in VB with the regular expression power of PerlScript with… whatever it is that JavaScript does well. Could be quite a nifty tool.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/wsAdvantagesOfWs.asp

Internet Explorer likes to throw the "Operation Aborted" error when trying to hook into the Google Maps API via JavaScript, at least when the JavaScript is placed where it is supposed to, i.e., a reference to the Google Maps JavaScript in the page HEAD and the actual rendering of the map within the DIV tag.

To fix this in IE, move the DIV block JavaScript code near the bottom of your HTML. Place it right between the terminating BODY tag and the terminating HTML tag. The problem seems to be that IE gets all confused when JavaScript attempts to make modifications to the page — e.g., sucking down a map from Google — while still rendering the body HTML. There are a couple other fix options here:

http://www.mapki.com/index.php?title=FAQs#Browser_Problems

It is worth noting that this "fix" does not break functionality in Firefox. And, really, who cares about the other browsers? Communists and robots, my friend.

In the HEAD of your page, you may include the initial JavaScript

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH" mce_src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH" type="text/javascript"></script> 

Though it surprised me that I couldn't remove the terminating SCRIPT tag and instead make the first SCRIPT tag self-terminating, i.e., instead of <script foo="bar"></script>, I tried <script foo="bar"/> and it didn't work.

The JavaScript that actually renders the map within the DIV tag, cleverly named "map", should look similar to the following:


</BODY>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[ 

var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
map.setMapType(G_HYBRID_TYPE);
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(-666.666,66.6666), 2);
map.openInfoWindowHtml(map.getCenterLatLng(), "100 Main St.<BR>Nowheresville, ZZ 99999
ZZZ");

//]]>
</script>
</HTML>