Reboot just finished. Great speakers, nice people, clever geeks – as usual. I wasn’t disappointed, Mygdal and his crew did a terrific job once again. While I hope to find the find time write a longer article referencing some of my favorite talks, this post is about something else I learned of at Reboot: Jaiku.
Some might say Jaiku is another Web 2.0 fling. Others might call it a Twitter clone. To me, Jaiku is a new way of expressing yourself on the internet. Jaiku let’s you do two things:
- Write short messages (max. 140 characters) that gets published in your stream immediately
- Aggregate all the stuff you publish on the internet; blogs, photos, bookmarks, music, etc.
For instance; at my Jaiku page you can see my latest presence-messages (or micro blog posts or just jaikus), but you’ll also see new blog posts, Flickr photos and del.icio.us books posted by me using those services. Jaiku does this by polling RSS-feeds specified by me in my settings.
While all this is nice, I still consider casperfabricius.com my primary homepage and “me-place”, so I wanted to be able to display my latest jaikus here on my blog. I could do this by using the Jaiku WordPress plugin, but that makes a server-side call to Jaiku on each page request, slowing my site down. For this reason, I opted to use Jaikus brilliant JSON API in order to let the magic happen client-side.
I wrote this javascript, and added the following HTML to my main index and page templates:
<!-- In the <head> section --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/myjaikus.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://[Insert your Jaiku username here].jaiku.com/feed/json?callback=MyJaikus.storeJaikus"></script> <!-- In the menu, where I wanted the Jaikus to appear --> <ul id="jaikus"> </ul>
This javascript will, if you remember to put in your own user name and add an empty unordered list with the id jaikus, insert the three newest of your jaikus. Neat, eh?
Jaiku ressources
- JaikuFans.com
- Very cool Jaiku Quicksilver plugin (I use it all the time)
- WordPress plugin
You are probably right, Björn. Don’t really remember, though. Gonna check out tumblr.com