I started a Javascript Stacktrace project back in August 2008. The idea was to give additional debugging power to browsers where you don’t have good tools to work with. I’d like to give you an update on where the project is today.
Lately, I’ve been working on updating my old script. Since it was written, we’ve seen lots of major browser releases and the introduction of the V8 Javascript engine used by Google Chrome.
Updated browser compatibility
Browsers that are fully-supported and well-tested:
- Firefox (and Iceweasel) 0.9+
- UPDATE: Chrome 1+ now perfectly supported
- Safari 3+
If you’ve been following me on twitter, you’ve already been tipped off that I recently got an older MacBook Pro. Since it came with Mac OS installed, I decided I would give it a fair, 30-day trial before I move it to Linux. I’m about 3 weeks in, and I’m logging my thoughts publicly so you can hopefully see benefit.
What I’m NOT comparing
In a word: speed. This was a significant hardware upgrade from my last computer, so I’m not going to say anything how everything is so much faster, smoother blah blah because it would’ve been anyway and that’s not useful to you or anyone. Also, virtualization: I know that I can get X or Y if I just use VirtualBox. I’m going to ignore that here for simplicity.
Ever since I’ve moved to my own server for my websites, I’ve wanted to reduce the number of HTTP requests per user as much as possible. Here is how I (and you) can use Python to shave 1 more request off that number.
I can do this (and remove a DNS lookup) by updating my Feedburner count using an automated script on my server instead of having each client request it.
Using the FeedBurner Awareness API
Most of the time you only care about getting your total subscribers at the moment. The FeedBurner Awareness API is far more capable than just doing that, but we’re going to keep it simple today.