Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Picture Rotator Rotates Back Around

Back in December I put together the first version of my picture rotator. At the time it was using v1 of the NewsGator Buzz framework. It was kinda cool, but it had some problems. For instance, as my boss helpfully pointed out, it didn't work in IE.

Well, we've been busy around NewsGator since then, and we've come up with a new version of the Buzz framework. So I created a 100% new version of the rotator and got rid of the old one. The new one is in the upper right corner, where the old one was.

So what's the difference? Well, let's see here. For starters, it works in Internet Explorer. Not that I think anyone should ever use IE, but I guess I can't stop you.

It has a nifty fade in/out effect, thanks in part to jQuery.

I took out the random rotation effect, because I didn't really like it anyway.

It also includes pictures from John Carmichael and Scott Ingram as well as myself. Not too many from any of us though -- one of our new features is to limit the number of posts from any one feed. This is handy because we all tend to post a lot of pictures at a time, so otherwise you might see all posts from just one of us.

Last but not least, it now needs only one line of script to get on the page. If you recall, in December it took multiple files and was a huge PITA thanks to Blogger sucking. This time around it was much, much easier. In fact, it worked the first time! This also means that you can get this little widget on your site easily. Just stick this line of code onto your page:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://nmp.newsgator.com/NGBuzz/Buzz.ashx?buzzId=1022&apiToken=783D7EE0744A42E4AAC02746037AD5FA" ></script>

Yep, that's all it takes now. I love technology!

We'll be releasing the tools behind building these Real Soon Now, so you could build your own that looks different or has different stuff in it. I'll be sure to blog about that when it happens. And now, back to work.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hheheh... Pretty cool! But some of your images "Independance Vista" for example are imported at their original size! Which creates a very abstract vertical slice of the image, all the way down your right column!

Thanks for the compliment of posting some of mine as well... Damn nice of ya!

-JC