So yeah, I'm making a laundry extension for Firefox.  That is, I want little washer and dryer icons in my Firefox statusbar to alert me to how many machines are available.

It's a lot easier to do with LaundryView.com already existing.  Once I remembered how to do AJAX stuff and send requests to another site, I could retrieve the site's text for Harper Hall, and then just parse it for the images that represent available washers and dryers, subtracting one washer for the legend on the right.

I do have the main function call itself on timeout, rechecking laundry every 10 minutes or so, but a good way to make the function automatically begin didn't occur to me in my first draft.  So you can click the button at any time to refresh the numbers, but it will automatically update every 10 minutes after your first click.  I had thought about making it number-refresh only, but I eventually want to do away with this button entirely, maybe making manual refresh an option later.

I also need to figure out how to add things to the statusbar.  As of now, it is its own toolbar, which isn't necessarily horrible, but most people would probably find it annoying.

So I called this first draft v .1a, just to emphasize its roughness.  I'll probably increment the number as I add more functionality.  In my first revision, I want to do away with the button, making it entirely automated, and some time, I'd also like to move it to the statusbar.  I might use different icons for the amount of washer/dryer usage instead of displaying the numbers to the side of each machine's green icon, and make the specific number a tooltip of the icon.

A thought that occurs to me is to make this program something actually useful - a generic laundry checker that can be pointed at any laundry room, instead of being hardcoded for Harper Hall of Bradley University.  But we'll see.

Hey, you know what nobody would expect?  The Spanish Inquisition!  Oh, and me posting to a blog.  That would be like, whoa.  So I'm going to.  Yeah.

Firefox 2 is awesome.  I'll just leave it at that, I guess.  Or maybe not.  Runs much faster, and the streamlining of search engines and add-ons are great.  Continuing my personal open-source-update-revolution, I downloaded Gaim 2.0 beta 4.  Since I only had the 2.0 beta packages for *nix before, and was running 1.5 on Windows, I upgraded my Guifications to a beta-compatible version.  Toaster pop-ups for everyone (er, people with Gaim 2.0 betas, anyway)!  Desparately looking for more open source software to upgrade, I snagged the newest version of OpenOffice.Org.  I haven't examined the changes there, but it looks like they're streamlining an extension project of their own, which would certainly be interesting, and make customizing it simultaneously easier and more powerful.

So - after this revolution of stuff, I noticed mention of improved RSS handling in Firefox.  I've been using Sage, an RSS extension for Firefox, for some time now to check news feeds without actually having to load news sites, but it finally occurred to me that I can store Live Bookmarks to blogs in my Sage RSS folder - therefore, I can check blogs a lot faster and more efficiently.

But, I wondered - could there not also be some decent extension to allow the converse?  A way to quickly update a blog when immediately when I find interesting things?

Yeah.  There is (it would be quite ironic if this doesn't actually work).  Performancing is an extension that adds an HTML editor and blog publishing capabilities to Firefox.  Pretty groovy.  There seem to be additional tools related to bloggery, but I haven't bothered to check most of them - I never really got into del.icio.us or anything, and the page tools seem to be temporarily down.

So yeah - random Firefox-extension-powered-updates?  Quite possible.  But right now, it's 3:20, and my roommate is asleep, so I should probably stop typing so loudly.  I probably wouldn't be awake, were it not for the fact that I have neglected to do my laundry until entirely out of shirts, and even then, failed to remember until only recently this morning.