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Many websites display a news ticker of one sort or another. A news ticker is a user interface element that displays a subset of a list of items, cycling through them one at a time after a set interval. In December 2010 I wrote an article titled Use jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker that explored how to create your own news ticker widget using jQuery and ASP.NET. The news ticker's content is defined as an unordered list (<ul>) where each list item (<li>) represents a news headline. Once the ticker's content is defined, having it cycle through the head lines is as simple as calling the JavaScript function startTicker(id, numberToShow, duration), which begins cycling the headlines in the unordered list with the specified id, showing numberToShow headlines at a time and cycling to the next headline every duration number of milliseconds.

This installment shows how to enhance the news ticker to enable pausing and resuming. With these enhancements, the ticker can be configured to automatically pause rotating its headlines when the user mouses over it, and to resume rotating them once the user mouses out. Similarly, with a bit of additional markup and script you can add pause and play buttons to a ticker, allowing a user to start and stop the ticker by clicking an image or button. Read on to learn more!

Many websites display a news ticker of one sort or another. A news ticker is a user interface element that displays a subset of a list of items, cycling through them one at a time after a set interval. For example, on Cisco's website there is a news ticker that shows the company's latest news items. Each news item is a one sentence link, such as "Desktop Virtualization Gathers Steam," or "Cisco Reports First Quarter Earnings." Clicking a headline whisks you to a page that shows the full story. Cisco's news ticker shows one headline at a time; every few seconds the currently displayed headline fades out and the next one appears. In total, Cisco has five different headlines - the ticker displays each of the five and then starts back from the beginning.

This article is the first in a series that explores how to create your own news ticker widget using jQuery and ASP.NET. jQuery is a free, popular, open-source JavaScript library that simplifies many common client-side tasks, like event handling, DOM manipulation, and Ajax. This article kicks off the series and shows how to build a fairly simple news ticker whose contents can be specified statically in HTML markup or created dynamically from server-side code. Future installments will explore adding bells and whistles, such as: stopping the news ticker rotation when the mouse is hovered over it; adding controls to start, stop and pause the headlines; loading new headlines dynamically using Ajax; and packaging the JavaScript used by the ticker into a jQuery plugin.

Read on to learn more!