This
is probably trivial to a lot of people. I’ve done a bit of javascript
work recently and in looking at reference material and code snippets
around the internet, I noticed that the ‘var’ keyword to declare a
variable seems to be optional in all cases. Even popular libraries,
like Script.aculo.us, have revisions where ‘var’ appears where it wasn’t in the previous release.
In your own coding there’s two things to keep in mind about it.
For global variables, it doesn’t matter, but you may want to use it for consistency.
Always
try to use ‘var’ to declare variables in local functions. It makes sure
you’re using a local copy of the variable instead of another variable
of the same name in a different scope.
For example, the two similar functions here have very different effects:
var myvar = 0;
function affectsGlobalVar(i){
myvar = i;
}
function doesNotAffectGlobalVar(i){
var myvar = i;
}
As
I’m finishing up this site, one thing I’ve gone back and forth on is
what categories I should create. How specific do they really need to
be? For example, If I write an article on how to create some nifty
do-dad in PHP, would a Code category be okay, or should I have a PHP category. Both?
After
thinking about it for a little, I decided to go to a few blogs I
frequent and see what categories they use. Maybe I should be consistent
with what others are doing. I’m not sure how many people really make
use of categories, but maybe consistency would be important.
What
I found is that there isn’t too much commonality in category naming.
Some people use a lot, others not. It’s obviously dependent upon the
type of blog.
One interesting thing I found out was that a
number of sites had categories listed with no articles attached to
them. Therefore, I decided to just start with nothing and create
categories as I go. I’m sure I’m not the first person to do it this
way, but it just didn’t occur to me right away.