The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

I've made a diff against spy 1.4 to make sure it will not allow multiple spy instances on the page with the same object ID. If .spy() is called again, the old timer will be cleared and the new one (with new settings) will take over. It should still allow multiple *different* spies on the same page, just not two of the same thing (I was having an issue  where it would keep reloading the same ID over and over because of a .click() event changing the configuration settings) - this allows real-time changing of the settings (say, the AJAX URL) without spawning additional timers.

I also added in a Math.random() parameter to force reloads every call and changed $.post to $.get - those can easily be removed if desired. Essentially I just create an array that has a list of all the spy IDs that are called, if a dupe is detected, the old timer is disabled and the new one starts like normal. Oh, and I changed the epoch behavior, for some reason on my browser it wasn't reporting the right time. I don't see why it needed the spy.epoch calculation at all.

Here's the patch file:
http://michaelshadle.com/files/javascript/spy-1.4-diff.patch

Feel free to submit your comments. This was the cleanest method I could figure out.

It took me a bit to find out why jQuery (now bundled with WordPress) was not working as I expected inside of the WP admin area. The script was being called, but my code like $("#foo") was not working. I really had no clue where to begin, since it still has all those old JS libraries/frameworks being called as well. It was due to Prototype being packaged with it and conflicting with the "$" shortcut.

Long story short, jQuery already planned for library conflicts and has a quick solution. The no-conflict mode allows you to define your own shortcut, and of course it works like a charm.

It's easy to do - just put this line in your code somewhere:

var J = jQuery.noConflict();

Now $("#foo") will be J("#foo") and it will not conflict with any other libraries that may be installed. I hope WP gets rid of all the other stuff and goes with pure jQuery and plugins soon enough though