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.