For the impatient: if you are viewing this in a feed reader and were expecting this to be a post about anime, I strongly suggest you change your feed subscription to the anime category rather than the general site one. In the very near future there may be some non-anime related posts that, if you’re just here for words on Japanese cartoons, may not appeal.
With that out of the way. I seldom post anything about my site itself primarily because it very rarely warrants it and accruing that much meta will no doubt bite karmically later. However in this instance there’s a few noteworthy topics, so in order of perceived importance:
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The newest addition to chaostangent.com is the carousel nestling comfortably at the foot of every page. Sporting a variety of "social media" feeds as well as other morsels, it showcases a number of interesting technologies and techniques including: a fully looping carousel (JavaScript and CSS), integration with numerous external APIs (PHP, Zend Framework), screen-scraping and local caching of results to name but a few. It successfully fulfils the primary goal I had for it: cramming as much functionality into a contained a space as reasonably possible.
I can just boot up Zend_Service_Delicious and be done with it right? If only things were that simple.
JavaScript
The carousel interface is design du-jour at the moment - sported by sites such as Apple, BBC iPlayer and Gametrailers - they manage selective display of information while still providing a high degree of interactivity. In short: they're swish and solve the problem of too much to feature in too little space. The carousel library I am using is a simplified, stripped-down version of one I developed for a large work project - for this reason I'm unable to release it under any kind of license. The original has a number of features that I wouldn't be using including automated construction of a "jump to" control and being able to navigate over a number of entries at once. My library is the only one I know of which successfully loops, providing an "infinite" carousel of sorts; other publicly available libraries cease at either end of the carousel which in some situations is more intuitive but the challenge of making one not do this was posed to me, and I couldn't very well pass it up.
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