I tried a variety of jQuery plugins for warning the user when they are about to leave a form with unsaved changes, and I couldn’t quite get any of them to behave exactly the way I wanted. Among other reasons, I needed to support TinyMCE and jQuery tabs. Anyway, I ended up rolling my own, which I’m making available in case it might help somebody else. Here’s the file, usage instructions are in the source comments:

jquery.isdirty.js

Note that this plugin relies on the onBeforeUnload event, which I think is only supported by IE and Firefox, but it works better and is less complicated than other solutions that don’t rely on that event. An unfortunate tradeoff. I wish that event were more widely supported.

I wanted to do something with Twitter, so hatched plovr. It scans Twitter looking for people who need help, and helps you help them (you can reply via the plovr Twitter account, without belonging to Twitter yourself, or you can click through to Twitter and lend a hand as yourself).

If you have a minute, check it out, maybe help a stranger while you’re there!

Neat sparklines plugin: jQuery Sparklines.

The NYTimes just rolled out a prototype of an alternative skimmer interface for browsing their headlines. Very clean.