Learn how to make Flair for my users (javascript snippets)

Question

I wanted to give my users a little piece of JavaScript or HTML code that they could put on their site and show information about them. Kind of like StackOverFlows new feature Flair.

I have an idea of how to code it. I was going to give them some JS with a HTML that had a DIV id="MySite_Info". Then the JS would go to my site and pull some JSON or XML and then fill in the data with a DIV in the HTML I gave them on their site.

Is there a better way to do this? Or any examples online I should follow? Whats the best way to create these javascript snippets? (Not sure what the proper name is)

Answer 1

There are two basic options.

1. Images (and pictures of text suck)
2. JavaScript - as you described

The approach I would take would be to:

1. Dynamically generate the JS using a server side process. This would include data for the user (using a JSON generator to easily produce the data in a suitable format).
2. Build the badge using standard DOM methods
3. Find the element with the document id and appendChild the generated badge