As some people asked me for them yesterday at the Web Standards Group Meetup London here are my slides on Maintainable JavaScript.

I took some out as they don’t make much sense without me monkeying around on stage and the others will be in the podcast that’ll be out some time later. I didn’t have any notes, but ad-libbed the lot so that’s all there is.

Thinkvitamin will release an article next week on the subject which will be a lot more hands-on and tell you what you can do to make your JavaScript more maintainable.

It was a lot of fun, and I hope to see some of the people I met at the next meeting. A big thanks to Stuart for organising and endangering all participants by allowing me on stage. Check out the flickr stream to see the crowd.

Are you quite proud about the amount of people linking to your site?

If you are, be smug about it and show it to the world, using a Smugpanel

Simply put a JavaScript in the HEAD of the document, customise it to your smug-URL, add a smug DIV and anyone can see who links to you.

There is another free sample chapter of my book available on the Apress.com site.

• Get Chapter3 From DHTML to DOM Scripting as a PDF

You can download the code examples at BeginningJavaScript.com

I just found an interesting fact about Picasa . The rather cool thing about Picasa – amongst other bits like the very smooth interface – is that it keeps your original images largely unscathed. When you rotate, resize or remove red eyes, Picasa will either just store what you have done in a file in the folder, or keep a copy of the original image, in case you messed up.

As a means of storage, Picasa stores a file called picasa.ini in each folder you applied changes to. Now, the rather funny bit about that is that it also does that when you want to hide a folder from view – for reasons that are totally your own private matter. Picasa will not show these folders, and you can even protect them with a password. However, it does not encrypt the folder or anything like that, all it does is add a

[Picasa]

P2category=Hidden Folders

[encoding]

utf8=1

to the Picasa.ini file.

This means that if you ever get to a computer with Picasa on it and you want to be the coolest hacker in the world, simply search in Windows (or even better Total Commander) for all Picasa.ini files that contain the text “Hidden” and you found what was not meant to be for prying eyes.

Now all you need is either the figure of Angelina Jolie or the sunglasses of Keanu Reeves and you are the coolest hacker on the block.

As I am covering the Yahoo! User Interface library in the “Using Third Party JavaScript” chapter of my book we decided to offer YUI users an exclusive preview excerpt of the chapter.

You can download the chapter excerpt in PDF format at the YUI Blog

Enjoy!