blackrat.org

Maintaining 4 separate blogs (2 project specific and intraneted, rather than external), doesn’t take any more time than 1, but it means that less gets added to this one than might otherwise be the case. However, one thing I can share is the work that’s been going on under the covers to get some Ajax code working on Blogger. (Yet another blog). This all came about when I had looked at some code and thought. Hmm. That would be so much easier to create, maintain and extend in Ruby.
I didn’t want the full blown features of Rails, but since I was experimenting with cutting down the code needed for yet another project, I thought that this would give me a good quick way of injecting Ajax code into a 3rd party site.
One of the rules of Ajax, is that you can’t go outside the domain for the call. So where an XMLHttpRequest.open(’GET’,'http://random.external.site.com/CGI_program’), would throw an error, you can do this by performing the call from an page on http://random.external.site.com.

For example, the header on Nofnords is an Ajaxified update from fnord.pqmf.com (a subdomain of this site), which has been embedded using an iframe which uses http://fnord.pqmf.com/fnord.html as the jumping off point. What this means is that the XMLHttpRequest comes from the same domain as the iframe’d page. Since this is a separate request, there is still a separate between the domains, so data isn’t accessible between the two pieces of content directly, but with some CSS, the appearance is (almost) seamless, and allows for some “personalized” customisation that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.