Crowd Favorite was approached by the nice folks at WordPress.com VIP on behalf of the People’s Choice Awards. When they told us they were interested in live-blogging functionality we immediately knew the Carrington theme framework would quickly allow for what they wanted.

Live blogging: just a plugin away

The live blogging mechanism has been implemented as both a tweak to the theme, and a configurable plugin. The plugin can enable and disable the “live” features, configure the time in seconds that should elapse before pinging the server for new posts, and the number of comments displayed in the live comment sidebar widget. These settings allow for on-the-fly tweaks by the live blog team depending on server load and comment activity.

Click to update, no refresh necessary

One of the hardest loads on live blogs is the constant refresh of pages that haven’t been updated. Even with caching, the server is having to send image and HTML files back to the user each time. With our ‘pinging mechanism’ a notification banner shows only when new posts are available. Once the user has clicked it, the latest content can be loaded into the page using AJAX.

Notifies users of new updates

The Live Blog theme allows for rapid-fire postings by the bloggers. Instead of worrying about interrupting the reading flow of users, the live-blogger can continue to publish new posts without users experiencing big page jumps.

Proudly built with the Carrington theme framework

We were able to easily allow for loading in new posts using AJAX. The Carrington framework template abstraction is ideal for the AJAX interactions of live blogs and the like.

Live comments: chatter while you wait

Using AJAX, it’s easy for us to constantly load a stream of comments into the sidebar while readers are waiting for new posts. This technique uses the same ‘ping’ technique but instantly displays the comments. Read more about the People’s Choice Awards Live Blog hosted on WordPress.com VIP.