This is for a site that received 269 points (413 up, 144 down) and had no prior traffic.

Unique Visitors per Day

That sums up to about 1,700 visitors, while still receiving a few hundred per day.

I also have analytics on this blog, which was discreetly linked to from jsregex.  This site receives almost no traffic, and is only occasionally perused by some of my friends.  Here is the data:

Unique Visitors per Day

Still a fairly small number: looks like roughly 0.3% of visitors clicked through to my blog.

Of course, I also have feedburner:

RSS Subscribers per Day

So roughly 13% of visitors to this blog went on to subscribe via RSS.  That is actually fairly good.  It probably helped that my most recent article was JavaScript related.

So now I know.  It was also fairly fun going through the referrals and finding all kinds of interesting sites, from social media mashups, to blogs in Japanese, Spanish, and other languages, to rip-offs of major sites like popurls.

And if you’re one of those new subscribers: hello there!  I hope you find something interesting here from time to time.

var text = "Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel" +
           " is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put" +
           " on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." +
           " -- Kurt Vonnegut"

var count = 0

var newVersion = text.replace(/ (\w+) (is)/g, function(match, g1, g2,
                                                       position, input) {

    count++

    document.write("Match: [" + match + "]. Found [" + g1 +
                   "] before [" + g2 + "] at position [" +
                   position + "].<br/>")

    return " " + g1 + " " + " REALLY is"

})

document.write(count + " matches found<br/>")
document.write("New version:<br/>"
document.write(newVersion)

This code will output:

Match: [ novel is]. Found [novel] before [is] at position [50].
Match: [ she is]. Found [she] before [is] at position [79].
2 matches found
New version:
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel REALLY is preposterous. He or she REALLY is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. — Kurt Vonnegut

There is a lot going on in this example, but I think it demonstrates what you can do with this function that is definitely not possible if you only use a string for the second argument to replace.

Here are what appear to be the arguments to the function passed to replace:

Match: The current substring that was matched by the regex.

Group 1: The first parenthesized group in the regex.

…

Group N: The Nth parenthesized group in the regex.  There can be an arbitrary number of these.

Position:  The numeric position in the text where this match occurs.

Input: The entire input text.  Not sure of what use this is.

The power to customize your replacement based on a variety of factors, as well as have an unrelated behavior happen for each match, is definitely useful.  Another piece of JavaScript wisdom revealed!

“A government bailout of the Big Three keeps huge amounts of productive inputs in firms that can’t use them efficiently. Forcing taxpayers to subsidize the continued employment of gargantuan quantities of raw materials, labor and capital goods in unproductive pursuits is a recipe for economic stagnation. The popular and politically convenient myth has matters backwards: The bigger the unprofitable firm, the more vital it is that it be allowed to fail.”

From an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal.

I found the information actually pretty unhelpful as an actual Boston resident.  So, for my fellow Bostonfolk, here are some additional notes to make the list a bit more useful.

1 ) Harbor Cruise: Skip if it isn’t a booze cruise.

2 ) Museum of Science: Only if you’re nine years old.

3 ) Walk through Beacon Hill: Walking up hills sucks, just go have dinner on Charles St.

4 ) Show at the Wang: Only if it is a concert, and bring 10s for the bar.

5 ) Walk down Newbury: And buy clothes and eat dinner. Repeat once or twice a month.

6 ) Cappuccino in a North End Cafe: Or get pissed that there is no parking and do something else.

7 ) Wander through the Emerald Necklace: That shit has a name?

8 ) Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: If your family is visiting.

9 ) Skywalk Observatory: If someone from outside the country is visiting.

10 ) See the Skyline from a Bridge: If you don’t already see it twice a day while commuting.

Designers love to excuse things like this by saying “Dude that’s dumb, everyone can tell it is music coming out of the headphones.”  In reality it doesn’t matter if the user can discern the intent.  It still looks like your logo beefed.

Never mind the terrible file name.  Notice how it finds it even though I didn’t know it had an underscore in the name.  Making the search do exactly what you expect would have been fine, but a real programmer thinks about what is really useful, even if it defies expectations.

Initial thoughts: Much better.  Way faster to get around.  Pretty.  Going to do some more exploring after work.

Simmons and Burke have a lousy website but it is worth digging through for some of their massive collages of images found online.

Blip.fm is like Twitter for music.  I have to admit that this one is aimed right at me.

Boxer has gotten DOS emulation for games, something that always sucked, simple enough to actually use without wasting away a few long nights.

ColorZilla Firefox extension is a color picker for the browser.  I only use a couple plug-ins, but this is one of them.

Seven popular fonts for designers and a nice description for each.

Some beautiful art by Tony Ariawan.

Cal Henderson at Djangocon gives a very amusing talk, which eventually leads to some actual discussion of Django.

Some (nsfw?) stupidity that still amuses me every time I see it.  I’ve said it before: cultural connotations don’t go away if you just ignore them.  A designer legitimately has to avoid this kind of situation.

And here is the silly stuff that I finish with.

The task: write an HTML parser in one week.  A good programmer gets it done.  A great one explains why the project is better off using an existing HTML parser.

The task: write a function to export a data structure to XML in three days.  A good programmer gets it done.  A great programmer asks why, finds out the reason for the task is irrelevant, and spends three days doing something useful.

The task: write a class that encapsulates some inventory business logic in a day.  A good programmer gets it done.  A great programmer thinks about it, nods, then gets it done.

If you’re worried that if you followed this process you’d often get the response “Just do it!” then your management may have some serious problems.