In the meantime, I've been working on implementing a "recent changes" text scroller on the left side of our website. This will show the most recent comment posts, recording/song additions, and any additions we make as well. I'm personally not doing the data side of this (although I might if we get time constrained) so my job is just the front-end.
Naturally I'm very lazy, so I prefer a pre-existing solution to making blocks of text scroll vertically. I like javascript and jQuery, but I don't want to spend too much time writing something like that. So I went looking for such a plugin.
And after looking at a good dozen or so different plugins, which for one reason or another I couldn't get to work with our text blocks, I finally settled on one called SerialScroll. Here's a list of features relevant to us:
 |
| Recent Changes Side-bar |
- Vertical scrolling
- Support for arbitrary scrollable items specified with CSS selectors
- Auto scrolling
- ~4 kb total size
Starting from the "News Ticker" demo at the demo page, I was able to customize it for our page and retrieve its content via AJAX.
I realize it's not too exciting since you can't see it scrolling, but just trust me that it does, in fact, scroll. Although we might change the look, this looks like the plugin we'll stick with.
Oh and for reference, here's our javascript:
$('#changelist').load('recentchanges .changeitem',function()
{
$('#changelist').serialScroll({
force: true,
axis: 'y',
items:'.changeitem',
interval: 2000,
easing:'linear',
lazy: true,
step:1,
start:0,
cycle:true,
jump: true,
event: 'click'
});
});
