Regex Hero Blog

So this was a stupid mistake. After I moved the tester to the "/tester" subdirectory, I removed some of the unnecessary CSS that no longer needed to be applied to the page. I didn't even think to check the site in all of the different browsers again because I hadn't done much. Apparently though I had forgotten something very important... #silverlightControlHost { height: 100%; } I needed to add that little bit of CSS back into the page. Without it Regex Hero was completely invisible to Firefox users. I am sorry about this problem. I wasn't told by anyone that there even was a problem. And I overlooked it because I rarely use Firefox. Anyway, it's solved now. This brings something else to my attention. I'd like to be contacted if there are any problems. But perhaps the GetSatisfaction thing is too much of a hurdle for some people. So I think I'll add a Contact page to the site. That way you can email me directly or use GetSatisfact...

Yeah, I guess it's getting there. The site was officially launched April 29th, 2009. Since then it's been blogged, tweeted, digged, dotnetkick-ed, del.icio.us-ed, StackOverflow-ed and made its way around the internet. In that amount of time it's had a total of 3,191 visits, a nice round number. Sorry I couldn't have blogged at more of a landmark type of number. Maybe next time I'll plan that a little better. Below is a graph (thanks to Google Analytics) of total visits from the past few months: And perhaps even more exciting, here's the ever-growing number of returning visitors over that same time period: To me the returning visitors is what it's all about. It just shows that people are indeed returning to use the online tool. Perhaps some people even come here because it has become their Regex testing tool of choice. And that's pretty awesome. To continue this progress I have a lot planned for Regex Hero in the near future. I'll ...

First and foremost, you'll notice that I've moved the tool itself to regexhero.net/tester . I've contemplated this move for awhile. On one hand, it was convenient that the home page contained the tool itself. On the other hand, it was a little slow to load for a home page, and a little off-putting for new visitors coming to the site who don't have Silverlight installed. The new home page is much smaller and faster to load to alleviate some of that first-load anxiety. The other difference is that I now have a reference page . This should be handy to pull up in a separate browser while you're using Regex Hero and need a quick regex reference . It's pretty short & sweet right now, but I will be working to improve and expand this page to become a more complete reference. As for the tool itself, I made some more improvements. I've made the auto-saving feature a little more aggressive. I was noticing cases where it wouldn't save. So when you c...

So I'll talk about the feature first. You may have noticed it. It's just a tall gray button along the side of the tool that you can click to collapse & expand the options menu. It can be useful when you're looking for a larger workspace. Plus it's fun to play with. I was motivated to add this because several weeks ago Steve Smith from RegexLib.com added Regex Hero to his site. I thought it looked a little cramped for space inside the page layout, so the ability to collapse the options menu has greatly improved this. In other news, Silverlight 3 has been released. There are some cool features that Microsoft has added that will be soon making its way into Regex Hero. The most profound of which will be out-of-browser capabilities. This will mean that soon you'll have the choice to run Regex Hero from the site, or from your desktop.

I knew there was room for improvement in the auto-saving feature. So I've made some changes that make the process faster and more efficient. As I talked about last time, the synchronous saving method just had to go. So I made it asynchronous for the 3 main text boxes: regular expressions, replacement string, and the target string. Now that it's asynchronous it doesn't slow you down as you type, even if the target string is quite long. Now, isolated storage does have a limit of 1 MB. So to make good use of space I've imposed a 200,000 character saving limit on these 3 text boxes. Anything beyond that will be truncated. The other change is related to the way I auto-save the settings (checkboxes, expanders, etc). Before I was doing something which was a little bit stupid, as it turns out. I was saving these settings into an XML file in isolated storage. And to do so I had added the System.XML.Linq assembly into Silverlight. Well I found that this was unnecess...

I think this feature improves the convenience factor of Regex Hero significantly. As you use Regex Hero, your settings and regular expressions will be saved into Silverlight's isolated storage. This works much like a cookie. Next time you visit Regex Hero from the same computer all of your settings and your regular expression will be retained. The only thing I haven't done yet is apply this to the target string. Long target strings were a little too slow to save for my taste. So I'll come up with a better (asynchronous) solution for that later.

Why would anyone in their right mind switch from a nice .com to the less desirable .net domain extension? Well I came up with what I think is a good reason. Since Regex Hero is very specialized towards .NET regular expressions, I thought it'd be good for my search engine placement if I make the switch. Google will put fairly heavy emphasis on the domain itself and even the extension when considering keyword relevance. So if you search for "ASP.NET" you'll find www.asp.net is the first result. Likewise, I'm guessing that eventually my search engine placement for "regex .net" will be quite good. Of course I still own regexhero.com and if you go there you'll be instantly redirected to regexhero.net , so this switch shouldn't cause any broken links.