I’d like to make a simple offer to the web geeks out there:

One hour of one person’s skills, to make the web a little bit more awesome, and raise $75 for your favorite environmental or medical charity.

Information Architects (the people behind iAWriter) have come up with a really spectacular JavaScript / CSS widget. When you load one of their long articles (like this one) you’ll see a widget in the top right corner that says “Older | Newer” and links you to the previous or next article. No big deal. What’s cool, is that as you gradually scroll through the article the widget disappears, then returns, hovering beside your scroll bubble (wherever that may be in its track); its message now telling you how many minutes it’ll take you to finish the article, at an average reading speed. When you get to the bottom it reverts back to the “Older | Newer” state.

This is something that I’d love to see flourish.

The CSS and JavaScript that powers it isn’t particularly complicated, but I don’t have time at the moment to break it out into a reusable library the way I did with Kudos. So, here’s my offer. For the first person to create a public domain or MIT licensed repository on Github that makes it trivial to add similar functionality to any blog, I’ll donate $75 to the environmental or medical charity of their choice.

I’m thinking a repo with one JavaScript file, one CSS file, an example HTML file, and a README. Simple. Less than an hour’s work for a good front-end geek.

Please note: IA’s stuff is copywritten so, while you can take inspiration for them, you can’t just extract (steal) their code. If you did, the MIT License wouldn’t be valid.