Let’s say you have the weird desire to see if a particular online news site is producing news articles that support the Schema.org standard. I just posted a tiny little site — even uglier than usual — that lets you search for a particular news media site. It will return the items on that site that have been classified by that site as newsArticles in the Schema.org standard.

Thanks to a suggestion from Dan Brickley, it’s using a custom search engine from Google. One of the parameters permitted by custom search engines is to only return items that are one of Schema.org’s types. (I’m sure I’m messing up the standards lingo.) All I’ve done is specify newsArticle as the type, and prepended “site:” to whatever search you’re doing, saving you five keystrokes. You’re welcome!

If you get back a bunch of articles, then presumably the site is supporting Schema.org. I think.

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I was writing a long-ish tutorial about how to use LibraryCloud that refers to bunches of Javascript. I wanted a way to refer to that code in the HTML document. So I wrote a converter that turns Javascript code (and maybe others) into HTML tables you can just plunk into your document.

Here’s an example of some code:

function init(){
// get textarea to accept tab key
// thank you http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6140632/how-to-handle-tab-in-textarea
	$("#rawjs").keydown(function(e) {
		if(e.keyCode === 9) { // tab was pressed
			// get caret position/selection
			var start = this.selectionStart;
			var end = this.selectionEnd;

			var $this = $(this);
			var value = $this.val();

			// set textarea value to: text before caret + tab + text after caret
			$this.val(value.substring(0, start)
						+ "\t"
						+ value.substring(end));

			// put caret at right position again (add one for the tab)
			this.selectionStart = this.selectionEnd = start + 1;

			// prevent the focus lose
			e.preventDefault();
		}
	});
}

And here’s what it looks like once converted into an HTML table:

There’s definitely some clunkiness to this. For example, if you click on the “toggle line numbers” button it hides or shows the line numbers for every such table in your document. (I’ll fix this eventually.) By the way, the “Toggle” button is there so your readers can select the code and not get the lline numbers.

Also, in order to get the formatting totally encapsulated within your document, I clunkily add a “<style>” section before each table. I couldn’t figure out any other way to do it without making your HTML document dependent on my server being up.

The utility is here: http://hyperorg.com/programs/convertJStoTable/convertJStoTable.html. The code itself is up at Github (but not quite up to date at the moment).

Please let me know all the ways it’s broken and sucks, although I don’t promise to do anything about it. It worked for me.

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