January 2010 Chicago JavaScript Meetup: I had a great time

So I had been meaning to go to a (relatively) local JavaScript Meetup for several months, but it always seemed to be scheduled when I was on a business trip, out of town on vacation, or some other event that I needed to be at. But on January 28th, 2010 I was able to attend. The format was supposed to be a few lightning presentations (10-15 minutes) followed by a more in-depth presentation. Unfortunately the person that was supposed to give the longer presentation on MongoDB (a built for scale database that uses JSON like structures to store data) wasn't able to make it so one of the event organizers (Zishan Ahmad) stepped up and gave a quick overview from some links provided by the original presenter.

I especially liked the quick presentation done by Jason Huggins on Node.js. It wasn't a dive dive by any means, nor was it meant to be, but I had heard about Node.js a while ago, and never really took the time to look at it. I could tell that Jason was pretty excited about Node.js and because of that excitement I have since read up a bit more on it. While it is focused on being a Server side implementation of JavaScript, it can be used to perform local processing as well from its own console application. I'm thinking about finding a fun little project to explore what Node.js has to offer.

Bookmarklets: Which do you use?

I've been interested in bookmarklets for quite a while now, starting with a bookmarklet that takes the current page you're at and jumps up a folder which is quite nice when Google drops you a number of levels deep in a site and you want to see what's up a level especially if you end up on a 404 page (An example of this bookmarklet is called "Up a Directory" which can be found on the Bookmarklet.com's Navigation category).

With the advent of Firebug, I've generally been stopped using them less and less often. I do keep Firebug Lite around for working with IE and Safari, and I will pull out MRI, XRAY from time to time and when I have some layout issues I may use Spry Media's Grid and Crosshairs bookmarklets (not to be confused with Adobe's Spry JavaScript framework).

And there's even some bookmarklets out there specifically for working with the Firebug console. For example, there's jQuerify which dynamically adds the latest version of the jQuery library to the page so that you can run some jQuery selector searches (or anything else jQuery) from the Firebug console.

Are there any bookmarket's that you use and what you use them for? Please share a link to the hosting site.