Question

I have the following scenario.
My twitter feed should refresh every 5 seconds (by using the load() function). Although I have been monitoring my bandwidth and it really sucks up a lot.

My idea was to stop refreshing as soon as the user goes inactive (say, 5 or 10 seconds no interaction on the page). I tried a few plugins but without success.

The refreshing goes as follows:

setInterval(function() { $("#feed").load("feed.php"); }, 5000);

It should stop refresh, but the plugins I tried just kept refreshing (running the interval).

Is there any way to achieve this? I tried the following plugins:
– http://www.bedroomlan.org/coding/detecting-‘idle’-and-‘away’-timeouts-javascript
– http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/a-new-and-improved-jquery-idle-timeout-plugin/

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The easiest way is to use the idleTimer jQuery plugin.

• http://paulirish.com/2009/jquery-idletimer-plugin/

One of it’s capabilities is to get the amount of time since the user was last active. It allows you to write the following code.

setInterval(function () { 
  if ($.idleTimer('getElapsedTime') < 5000) {
    $("#feed").load("feed.php");
  }
}, 5000);