Making Campfire Work for Me (and More Like IRC)
One of the companies I work with has decided to use the 37signals line of products for internal project management and communication (which I think is great BTW). This means that I sit in a Campfire chat room for the working hours of my day, along with a handful of other developers. I started to run into a problem, though, when I didn’t need to be talking with others. It is difficult to tell when people are trying to talk to me. Campfire has, by default, two methods of notifying you of new messages: an unread messages counter (dock icon or browser tab), and optional sound ‘dings’. When I’m trying to work on something though that doesn’t involve chatting with others, all the while the chat room still active with other developers, it’s really distracting to hear constant ‘dings’ or have to repeatedly check new messages to see if they pertain to me.
The situation for me is similar to lurking on IRC channels. But IRC has been around much longer than Campfire, and IRC client developers are familiar with the problem. Thus, many IRC clients allow you to specify keywords, that, when present in other users messages trigger some form of notification, like a sound or Growl message. Well, this clearly is the feature I needed to solve my Campfire problem.
Greasemokey to the rescue! I stumbled across this userscript that allows you to set triggers for Growl notifications. Boy was that a welcome find. There were still some problems though. For one, I noticed that the chat window wouldn’t always detect that it had lost focus correctly, and as a result, I would miss some of my notices. Two, I wanted the same functionality for sound notifications. Three, it would be nice if at least some of it would work in Firefox, not just Fluid.
Thus, a new userscript was born: Campfire Notifications. As expected, it aims to solve the problems mentioned above. Growl notifications of course won’t work in Firefox. I’ve read, however, that Firefox 3 has added support for Growl. If I can get more information on that I may get it working in a future version.
On a related note, the guys at collectiveidea came up with an interesting way of writing Campfire plugins for things like post_commit VCS hooks. It’s called Tinder. Enjoy!
Negative Word Matching with Regular Expressions
Today on the #codeigniter IRC channel someone asked about how to match a string that didn’t start with a specific word using a regex. I quickly threw out that, off the top of my head, /^(word){0}/ should work. Well, surprisingly, it didn’t. Turns out negatively matching words with regular expressions is a little more difficult.
After a little research I came up with a working solution: /^(?!word).*/
This post by Jeff Atwood helped: Excluding matches with Regular Expressions
SparkStats Widget Patch
Luc Betheder wrote a handy little widget for Sean McBride’s SparkStats plugin, which I recently started to use. I noticed, though, that whenever I made changes to my widgets the custom title I set for the Sparks plugin would get wiped out. So I fixed the problem in the plugin and thought I’d send the patch to Luc. Turns out, I can’t get in touch with him. You have to be registered on his blog to comment, but he has registrations turned off. Also, his email address was nowhere to be found. Hmm…slightly frustrating. I’m not giving up though, so here’s my patch (I’m also testing out the Google Syntax Highlighter):
--- sparks.php 2008-02-16 14:14:22.000000000 -0500
+++ sparks.php.mine 2008-02-16 14:14:58.000000000 -0500
@@ -63,13 +63,13 @@
// Clean up control form submission options
$newoptions['title'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['Sparks-title']));
$newoptions['text'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['Sparks-text']));
- }
- // If original widget options do not match control form
- // submission options, update them.
- if ( $options != $newoptions ) {
- $options = $newoptions;
- update_option('widget_Sparks', $options);
+ // If original widget options do not match control form
+ // submission options, update them.
+ if ( $options != $newoptions ) {
+ $options = $newoptions;
+ update_option('widget_Sparks', $options);
+ }
}
// Format options as valid HTML. Hey, why not.
Download the patch: SparkStats Widget Patch
Javascript For-in Loops
Note to self: do not use for-in loops to iterate over an array. Javascript frameworks will add methods and properties to the array object which will then be looped through and summarily break code.
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About
Sean Murphy is a software developer and lifestyle entrepreneur currently living near Orlando, FL. He loves working with smart people, writing cutting edge software, sharing knowledge, and most of all, steak.
