This is very cool. I also just noticed a neat quirk - if you switch tabs (I'm on chrome) the animations pause but the timer to show the text keeps ticking. So all the text bunches up at the bottom until you switch back at which point the text blob starts to fade out all together.
Not a bad idea to respond to visibility, but to solve the blob problem it would be better to explicitly synchronize text creation and text position. This is basic in game/simulation programming: you don't want the rules of the game to change depending on the performance of the computer — it may be slower, but it should be internally consistent.
For example, have a single, explicit 'scroll position' or 'time' variable (they're equivalent in this case), increment it on a timer, and insert new text when (time mod N) rolls over.
I was hoping I could bung in any url and see the text scrolling, like a BBC.co.uk news item, or something. Was looking forward to reading the news in that format. Especially with the music. It kinda seemed appropriate for a certain huge UK story...
This is the whole reason why I went into computer science. I watched all of my repos twice today, then I started picking repos at random. Even my non-techie "I can't work an Apple Magic Pad" big-boobed wife thinks it's super cool. Well done!!
There's small problem on how browsers respond, when we change the hash#parameter in the URL and hit ENTER in the sites where DOM is manipulated using AJAX depending on hash-value, like in this site. It doesn't get updated until we hit ENTER for second time in Chrome, reload in Firefox.
I also have a similar site that manipulates DOM depending on hash value. If you are on instamovi.com/#bourne with bourne movies listed...and you change it to instamovi.com/#bond and hit ENTER, there's no change in the DOM. You have to hit ENTER again, then the movie listing changes to Bond movies.
Similar thing happens here on starlogs.net/#repo1 to starlogs.net/#repo2
This is awesome! Is the entry box for the repo supposed to go away once it finds it? It stayed there, covering the text in Chrome 27 dev on Arch... It would be cool if it disappeared.
I had that problem on Chrome 26.0.1410.63 as well. If you refresh the page (or just go directly to the URL that gets produced after you specify a repo), it won't be there.
I love the idea, but I'd have preferred a more subtle approach, e.g. using only music with a free license or explicit permission by the author. Although I don't consider George Lucas to be a troll, I'm afraid that in general, this attitude (just use the music and see what happens) is an invitation for copyright trolls.
Nice, but please consider switching to HTML5 history (pushState). It's just as easy and a lot cleaner. Especially that you can use popstate to let people switch the URL.
If he were to use pushState for this, wouldn't he need a .htaccess (or other means) to point all requests to index.html? Meaning it's not just as easy?
It's also easy to get broken behaviour (on one site I use the url is updated without a new history entry, and even on GitHub the page sometimes gets desynced).
I don't like how it joins the summary line and the explanatory text with just a space. I'd recommend preserving blank lines in the commit message as line breaks.
Well then it wouldn't be very private, would it? I mean if you're trusting this website with your commit logs, presumably they would also have access to all of your source code...
