Jquery, Twitter & a night of coding

I’ve always used prototype and scriptaculous to do JS stuff in the past. However I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about jQuery and i’d noticed that sites i’d seen using jQuery seemed to have much smoother animation etc. So in the spirit of keeping an open mind (and continuing to learn.. something I don’t find myself doing that often anymore) i set about building a simple JS based web app to test how jQuery would suit my programming etc.. After about 4 minutes of brainstorming, I found myself getting annoyed, and switched to myTweetdeck to distract myself. In a semi-relevant aside, i have to say, tweetdeck makes my twitter usage about 100x as useful.. plug! So i decided it would be cool to try knocking upa simple Ajax application that emulated Tweetdeck’s searching features – using the search.twitter.com api (previously summize). So i downloaded jQuery, and set up 3 simple div based columns to hold the tweets i was going to be grabbing. The beautiful thing i discovered with jQuery is it can cross domain ajax requests, so i can talk directly to the search.twitter.com api without having to write a proxy script on my server – cool! The twitter search API has an option to return JSON data, which is really great for building an app like this, since we end up receiving the data and handling it all in JS with no decoding necessary.. too easy. So, we have our 3 divs and at this point I started to get my hands dirty in jQuery (i’m not a complete beginner, but i never really used it extensively.. so i was keen to...