I’ve been bitten…
…by the web development bug. Help me, I can’t stop! Yesterday I decided to integrate Twitter into the site, so I can push up-to-the minute updates (or rather, that was my justification, but I’m kidding myself – I just wanted to see if I could). I’ve never been a fan of Twitter as-is, but perhaps as a micro-news feed on the site it will serve some purpose.
You’ll probably also note the sexy new donor information underneath the Pledgie Donate button, with the brand-new fading between donor information. That’s my first real attempt at anything jQuery-y, since I wanted to learn it. On that note, I’ve found this site to be invaluable for all your jQuery learning needs. I was a bit surprised that my initial attempt at finding a simple “fade out this box and fade it back in again every x seconds with different content” didn’t already exist for jQuery in a simple form; it seems it’s either a giant “includes the kitchen sink” plugin, or nothing. Since I don’t want to bog down the page too much, I decided to knuckle down and go the latter route.
You should also notice that the page degrades perfectly; if javascript is disabled, you just get static text of the latest donor. This is done via a server-side PHP script which caches the pledgie JSON code every 20 minutes, and which inserts the latest donor into the page when it is retrieved from the server.
Now, what else can I stuff into this thing?
It’s funny because I’ve also started using Twitter and sent my first message about a hour earlier. I’ll surely backup my tweets because like you, I don’t like to store valuable information solely in the cloud.
Having to use URL shortening services with Twitter bothers me a bit.
I’m still not convinced it’s all that useful, but I was interested in adding it “just to see of I could”. If nothing else, I’ll allow me to add small site updates without a full blog entry, which people can receive via RSS.
– Dean