Learning to write JavaScript

“So now that I work at Mozilla, I figured it was time to develop
a “web app” just to make sure I understood it all. And since my
team is working on educational resources for web developers, I
wanted to see what it was like to learn how to use some of them
using resources online.

“So I decided to use the resources I could find online and write
some JavaScript to do a pet project of mine. What was the problem I
wanted to solve?

“I really wanted a way to automatically add “Photo by ” to the
bottom of Flickr pages I want to use in my presentations. I have a
number of workarounds I’ve developed to do this in an effective
way, but I really just wanted to click a button. For example, at
first, I saved the image with the author’s name as the file name,
and then every time I used the picture, I added text to the slides.
Then I wrote a Ruby script that went through all my picture files
and added “Photo by ” to them. But that is still a three step
process: grab the author’s name, save the photo as the author’s
name and then run the script. Also, I like searching on Flickr
better than I like searching my personal archive. Tags are
nice.”

Complete Story