Today I decided to do something about my tragic footer; tragic because it was a simple copyright, navigation and social link icons. So I did what everyone else does and incorporated a Twitter feed, Blog RSS feed and a nice list of social links and icons, simple right?

Wrong.

I found this jQuery twitter feed plugin a while back which I implemented on one of my University projects which was nice and simple, but when I brought it over to this site, it stopped working. Same thing happened when I implemented this jQuery RSS feed reader! It was an epidemic! And what do you do when things don’t work? Well you ask those who know best, which in my case is the good folk at Forrst.

I found that removing the “prototype” Javascript library the plugins would work… But after some back and forth, one of the members suggest I “map jQuery to $ using a closure, but even with this some of your plugins might not work (depending on how they are coded)” which made little sense to me… But in the end another member told me to simply do this:

jQuery(function($){
    ...your doc ready code here...
});

Which worked! Great! But I still don’t know what I did/what he told me I was doing. I did a bit of goolging, but still can’t find a clear explanation, so If anyone could explain this to me, do leave a comment!