Monday, September 29, 2008

Dynamic BatesBunch

I put in quite a bit of time this weekend into an upgrade to batesbunch.com.  My goal was to turn my old fashioned home page into a dynamic RSS aggregator of all of our stuff.  I started by finding pageflakes and google widgets, but no one made the widgets I wanted.  They didn't work, or they weren't configurable enough.  So I ended up deciding to write my own. 

I am a jquery fan (at least a fan of the library's power, if not the chain writing style), and I started to look into JSON so that I could eliminate the need for backend processing of my feeds.  It has worked out great!  I now have a nice dynamic flickr slideshow (which took forever to get firefox to do right), as well as a list of my photosets.  Flickr's api rocks!

I am now working on my blogger stuff (which does not rock as much...lots of garbage in the interface).   I expected more from google...but.  Then add some layout work and voilla!  

I want it to be an easily lifted template for others, so everyone can leverage my work.  Still working on it, then I'll stuff it in a library for others to use.

1 comments:

Jan said...

Yeah, my pageflakes and widgets get all out of wack, too....

(HUH??)

lol. Dave, you're too smart!!