the twins have arrived

The twins have arrived. Check out the family blog for info and photos.

ajax lessons

I ran across this post recently. I especially like the tip of returning data via AJAX as JavaScript expressions (that can be passed to eval()) rather than as XML strings that must be parsed. That makes a great deal of sense when you think about it.

1. You don't need to spend browser cycles parsing textual data.


2. Data will end up being parsed using JavaScript anyway... might as well nest the data in a JavaScript data structure initially.


3. JavaScript eval() is fast!

If you're messing around with AJAX, I would highly recommend taking a closer look at this post (and the articles linked from this post) before you go too far down the path.

ian's blog updated

I've updated Ian's blog with new 23 month photos.