I’ve written a few times before (1, 2, 3) about techniques for rotating images in place on a page, such as is done on the home page of the College site.
The brief history is that it started in JavaScript, then went to Flash, and now is back to JavaScript using the jQuery library and the jQuery Cycle Plugin.
One of the motivations for finding a new solution was that it seemed from the server log reports that the Flash movie was making an awful lot of server requests. That just struck me as inefficient. Also, when viewed on the iPhone, only the placeholder jpeg image was showing because there is no Flash on that platform.
The new method is also easier to deal with in that all the components to be rotated are just DIVs in the page and can contain anything that fits the space. I also don’t have to deal with an XML config file, which made it easier to implement in a place where a CMS is present. (I used a Textpattern form to contain the rotating content, but could have almost as easily put it into a story.)
