Dan Webb at The Web's Bollocks has posted a great article, Cleaner Callbacks With Partial Application. It describes ways to use JavaScript closures to keep your code cleaner and more reusable, especially when creating XMLHTTPRequest callbacks. If you understand the basics of closures but want to see some practical applications, go check it out.

If you're new to closures or have been struggling to understand how they work, I recommend reading Mark Wubben's introduction, Getting Funky With Scopes and Closures. For a more detailed and thorough analysis, be sure to read Richard Cornford's JavaScript Closures.

In November, I put some tools written in JavaScript on here. These are mostly conversion tools, things like pounds to kilograms, kilometers to miles, etc.

I had the idea of coding and hosting some random JavaScript things on here, but since then I haven't added anything.

Then I forgot about them.

Now, I get most of my traffic on these conversion tools. As of recently, if you search millimeters to inches on Yahoo!, my site is #1. Because of this, I've gotten a whack of traffic just on this one page.

I wonder what it is about that page that Yahoo! considers so special. There aren't even any sites that link to it. It's really some kind of SEO marvel.

This is a last call for submissions to the first monthly Carnival of the Web. Saturday, June 17th is the deadline, as the carnival will be posted here on Sunday.

So if you have a blog that web professionals would be interested in, or if you've read something really great on another blog in the past month, please make a submission.

When early versions of Internet Explorer 7 were released, it was clear that IE would now have a search toolbar like Firefox. It was also clear that this would default to use MSN, rather than the Firefox default of Google. Google freaked out and tried to sue Microsoft, but the Justice Department said it was OK and prevented Google from doing anything about it. Google's strategy was to continue to promote Firefox, as well as give instructions to IE 7 users on how to change their default search engine.

Now, Yahoo! has released a customized version of IE 7 beta which presets the homepage and search bar to Yahoo!. Rather than fight the beast, they've embraced it and made things even easier for people who still prefer Internet Explorer. Good move, Yahoo!.

Disclaimer: I only use Internet Explorer for testing. Firefox is definitely the way to go for day-to-day surfing.

Did you ever own a directory of the web? Like this big yellow pages book with every known web page on the Internet? I did. I never used it. I guess I skimmed through it, but it was very soon out of date. Not only were half the links gone, but there were so many new sites that just weren't included. The thing is like an antique now. It'll probably be in a museum one day.

A few years later, the web got bigger and bigger. Soon it was too big to be navigated by a book, and of course search engines took over. The web was filled with many new web pages, most "Under Construction", and we were told to "Check back soon". Still, it felt like we could conceivably read the whole Internet if just given enough time. What we didn't consider was that the growth of the Internet would never stop.

Now look at where we're at. It's impossible to stay up to date on the 10 or 100 or 1000 web sites we visit without using RSS feeds. Thanks to technorati, we can see what others are saying about a topic in nearly real time. We've been forced to give up trying to "surf" the whole web, and have mostly settled down into our niches with barely enough time to do even this.

With so much information to choose from, only the very newest is often paid attention to. When you arrive at a new site, or subscribe to a new blog, do you take the time to read all the old posts? Or do you just sign up and look forward to the next posts, the newest stuff. I know I rarely have time to go back and read older stuff.

The Internet is indeed a giant repository of information, but the way many of us are using the Internet is changing along with the web itself. The blogosphere isn't just a sign of the personal web, it's also a sign of the timely web. We're less interested with what others have said about a topic, now we want to know what they've said about it lately.