Matt here: I work on a lot of our JS here at Olark - would love to dig into any loading issues you saw! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our latest stuff loads async (http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a...) so it'd be great to ensure that we're actually succeeding there :)
Feel free to come on over and chat, or shoot an email to support[at]olark.com
It wasn't the async stuff. It was more like olark##.olark-server.com not responding randomly which would cause my page load to block waiting for the server to respond. Probably just a server down or temporary outage, but it was enough to shake my trust a bit and just remove it since we were just starting out with it.
Ah, how long ago? This kind stuff should be resolved in the latest editions. We load all those requests async now, and recently we started pre-loading a few of them to improve performance further. If you have any more details, shoot 'em over. Thanks for keeping us accountable!
That causes the browser to block waiting for a response.
It was a couple months ago, but I think it was olark19 not responding.
While I appreciate what you guys are doing a lot, I'm not willing to be a beta tester for your networking. Stuff like that absolutely needs to be hosted on an architecture that just doesn't go down. Ever.
It warms my heart to hear that :) Chat has built so many relationships for us too, and you just get much richer feedback (or praise!) from a "real" back-and-forth discussion with a customer.
"...[customized and unique user experience] builds the visitor’s trust and helps you gain better traction."
Ditto this. If you're not focused on personal experiences, it is hard to (1) build or sell a product that people actually want and more importantly (2) engage in meaningful relationships with customers.
I'd love to see more digging in on #2 (relationships) in particular. We came from the relationship-angle, and only recently started leveraging that with more powerful targeting (http://www.olark.com/targeting).
In my opinion, a meaningful two-way customer relationship still trumps a simple "deal popup". However, targeting is a great tool for focusing our attention and cultivating those relationships :)
For sure! I'd really like to - just didn't have time to extract it out this week :) To be useful, you will probably want the collection components too. Maybe some weekend hacking...
...this technique begins downloads immediately, but still avoids blocking window.onload (just ran a brief test myself to verify this behavior). Unfortunately, it requires the third-party provider to adopt LightningJS. Here's to hoping that more providers take notice :)
I agree. LightningJS was originally written for third-party Javascript providers to improve their own embed code, though I think it would be awesome if end-users could easily take matters into their own hands. Maybe something for future development...
Good question. Since LightningJS writes the iframe with a "javascript:" URL, that iframe is really part of the same domain (and therefore same security context). To access the window on the original document, just use the "window.parent" object.
I did just now :) The concepts in Caja are really interesting, but probably outside the scope of LightningJS. We used the term "safe" as in "safe from library conflicts", though I can see how that might have unintentionally indicated that it provides a managed sandbox as well.
That said, some kind of Caja integration could be a pretty nice addition to LightningJS.
Haha, yea I remember that post. Good stuff. LightningJS is really more focused on being "safe" as in "no library conflicts", rather than sandboxing the code itself. In general, end users are copy/pasting embed code directly, so there wouldn't really be a guarantee that the third-party wrapped their resulting code in ADSafe :)
Definitely would be interesting to perhaps include some concepts from ADSafe into LightningJS though - maybe in the bootstrap component?
