Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

IceRocket has this cool feature where they can show the number of inbound links to a specific blog post. This way you can show metadata about threading within your blog.

Here’s an example:

Which is a great idea. The problem is that their implementation isn’t as fast as it could be.

Right now they write the iframe while the user waits. This cause the entire page to lockup on the client while its rendering.

This could be implemented in a much more robust manner.

The first change would be to load the script via a src= load to keep all the logic on their server. This way the cut and paste on my end would be a lot easier.

The second half of the problem is that they’re doing realtime writes into the HTML document which causes page load to pause until IceRocket’s servers respond.

If they were to add an onLoad handler within their javascript they would be able to update the page after the document loads. In the interim they could just show text that says “IceRocket Links”. Then the page will load, their onLoad handler will be called, and they can fill in the results now that we’re done.

All of which would be done in the event loop which shouldn’t block the browser.

When done you could change “IceRocket Links” to “33 IceRocket Links” and the user wouldn’t really notice much page redraw since the change is so small.