JSPatterns.com

In the previous post I announced that one person will win a copy of the Brazilian Portuguese translation of JavaScript Patterns. So here's the winner:

@LouMintzer

He wins a signed copy of "Padrões JavaScript". Waiting for your mailing address, Lou 🙂

Update: Lou Doesn't speak Portuguese, so he gets an English copy. The second winner is:

@puresight

Update: Monty is not too proud of his Portuguese skills either, so third is

@abozhilov

Asen is an awesome JavaScripter, who actually reviewed the book (thanks a million!) and he already has a copy. Next.

@mexitek

How I picked the winner

By writing some JavaScript in the console, of course.

The winner was to be randomly picked from all those who retweet my tweet or post a comment in the announcement. So I had to collect those.

Twitter

The tweet page says there has been 27 retweets (worded a bit like 28, but looks like it's 27). The page only shows about 15 people though and I need all of them. Given how Twitter doesn't let you search older stuff, I was afraid it was too late. I had to check the API first. I was expecting I can hit a few URLs and get the data I need. Tough luck. All these auth keys, tokens, secrets and stuff got me floored.

Luckily Twitter's UI is also using the APIs. Checking the network traffic I was able to spot the request I need!

The URL is:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/49323240014872576/retweeted_by.json?count=15
I only needed to change the count to something over 27, so I made it 30. Lo and behold I got the data!

The rest of the stuff I did in Safari's Web Inspector console.

Visiting the URL:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/49323240014872576/retweeted_by.json?count=30

We have a JSON array as a document.

>>> var a = document.body.innerHTML
>>> a
"<pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">[{"profile_link_color":"0084B4","verified":false,"not....]</pre>"

Safari puts all in a PRE behind the scenes, so this is how we get the data:

>>> var source = $$('pre')[0].innerHTML;
>>> source
"[{"profile_link_color":"0084B4","verified":...]"

eval() it:

>>> source = eval(source)
[Object, Object...]
>>> source.length
27

Sounds right. Now let's move all usernames into a new array using the new ECMA5 forEach fancy-ness:

>>> var all = [];
>>> source.forEach(function(e){all.push(e.screen_name)})
>>> all.length
27
>>> all
["jrfaqcom", "gustavobarbosa", "gabrielsilva", ...."vishalkrsingh"]

Blog comments

I had 4 comments on the original post. WordPress puts all comments in a div with class commentlist, so this allows us to grab all comments:

>>> var comments = $$('.commentlist cite a')
>>> comments.length
4

Now let's only grab the names, they are in the href's innerHTML:

>>> var all = [];
>>> comments[0].innerHTML
"Fabiano Nunes"
>>> comments.forEach(function(e){all.push(e.innerHTML)})
TypeError: Result of expression 'comments.forEach' [undefined] is not a function.

Eh? What? Oh, the list of HREFs is not an array but a NodeList:

>>> comments
[
<a href="http://fabiano.nunes.me" rel="external nofollow" class="url">Fabiano Nunes</a>
, 
<a href="http://www.gabrielizaias.com" rel="external nofollow" class="url">Gabriel Izaias</a>
, 
<a href="http://www.jrfaq.com.br" rel="external nofollow" class="url">João Rodrigues</a>
, 
<a href="http://www.jrfaq.com.br" rel="external nofollow" class="url">João Rodrigues</a>
]
>>> comments.forEach
undefined

So, list of nodes converted to array:

>>> comments = Array.prototype.slice.call(comments)

Now forEach is usable:

>>> comments.forEach
function forEach() {
    [native code]
}
>>> comments.forEach(function(e){all.push(e.innerHTML)})

So we have a list of all names. Lets serialize it, so it can be pasted to the other window where we had the Twitter data.

>>> all
["Fabiano Nunes", "Gabriel Izaias", "João Rodrigues", "João Rodrigues"]
>>> JSON.stringify(all)
"["Fabiano Nunes","Gabriel Izaias","João Rodrigues","João Rodrigues"]"

(Simple array join and then string split will do too in this simple example)

All together

Back to the twitter window. Deserializing the comments array:

>>> comments = JSON.parse('["Fabiano Nunes","Gabriel Izaias","João Rodrigues","João Rodrigues"]')
["Fabiano Nunes", "Gabriel Izaias", "João Rodrigues", "João Rodrigues"]

Merging the two arrays

>>> all = all.concat(comments);
["jrfaqcom", "gustavobarbosa", ...."João Rodrigues"]
>>> all.length
31

Perfect. 31 entries. Just as many as the days in March when I announced it. So let's take the 19th array element to be the winner.

But shuffle the array a bit first.

Suffle

Sorting the array by randomness. (I shuffled and reshuffled it three times, just because.)

>> all.sort(function() {return 0 - (Math.round(Math.random()))})
["ravidsrk", "anagami", "lpetrov", ...]

And the winner is:

>>> all[18]
"LouMintzer"

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.