Free Wisdom Online: Ajaxified with AHAH

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Back in summer, under the influence of
[AJAX](http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php)
craze I decided I wanted to add a bit of AJAX-like functionality and
have the blog entries update without reloading the rest of the page.
I looked at a few AJAX libraries, but found them too big and too
complicated.  Given that what I wanted was so simple, it just didn't
seem worth it.  Then yesterday I read about
[AHAH](http://www.crackajax.net/ahah.php), which is AJAX simplified to
just two JavaScript functions, which did exactly what I wanted: make
an HTTP call, get HTML from it and insert it into a div by ID.  What I
found surprising is how little it takes.  The Javascript code (adapted
from [CrackAjax.net](http://www.crackajax.net/ahah.php) is
[here](http://www.freewisdom.org/jatoba/ahah.js).  It is just 45
lines, which included _four_ lines that I had to write myself:

function getBlogEntry(path) {
       return callAHAH(
	  "http://www.freewisdom.org/jatoba/blog_fragment.php?path=" + path, 
	  "blog_entry", "<center>updating...</center>", "whoops");
    }

After that, all I had to do is write a PHP script that returns requested page:

<?php
       $include_comments = '1';
       $comment_key = 'entries/' . $_GET['path'];
       include("/home/yuri/www/en/entries/" . $_GET['path'] . 
               "/fragment.html");
    ?>

I already had the text of each blog stored in a "fragment.html" in an
appropriate directory, so all I had to do in this script is set a few
parameters and include the file.  With Ajax, you need to worry about
getting the right headers, etc.  Beyond that it is just a matter of
adding "onclick="getBlogEntry(...); return false;" to the links.

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