is a follower

Is a Follower

An add-on for Dribbble

This is a piece of Javascript that adds a small status indicator to the user's profile and shot pages to show if he/she is following you on Dribbble.
Indicator on user's profile page
Indicator on user's shot page
Indicator states
A pair of announcements on Dribbble is here and here.

To use

The same code is available in three packaged forms. To use the bookmarklet, drag the above link ("Is a Follower") to your Bookmarks bar, then navigate to the Dribbble page you want to add the isFollower indicator to and click on the bookmark.
If you have a lot of followers - in thousands - the code will take a while to run on its first run. This is the only time it needs to download your entire list of followers and due to Dribbble API restrictions it cannot go faster than 30 followers per second after the first thousand or two. All subsequent updates of the list, e.g. when you pick up new followers, are generally very fast.
Hovering your mouse over the indicator will show you, in real-time, the progress: The code works in Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari and Chrome. I would venture a guess that it doesn't work in Internet Explorer, but that's an easy guess to make.

To hack

The source code is on Github. The copyright is mine, but otherwise feel free to do what you want with it: isFollower on github

How it works

The thing works by pulling off your Followers list via Dribbble API and comparing user's ID from the currently viewed profile or a shot page against this list.

The code does a decent job of trying to stay really fast. For one, it caches the folowers list locally. For two, it updates the list only if the number of your followers changes or if it was a week since the last update (just in case if some people followed and the same number of people un-followed). For three, when it updates the list, it does so incrementally, scanning from the most recent end and stopping once it picks up all the changes. This is the best part, because it means that updating the list after new followers are picked up (and without loosing any) can be done in just one or two API calls.

That being said, on the first run it needs to download the entire list. As of February 2012 the API allows querying the list in 30 follower increments and it also imposes a general cap of 60 requests/min. The code therefore implements request throttling - it sends first 30 requests back to back, next 30 - 250 ms apart and then spaces the rest in 1 sec intervals. Hence the blazing speed of the initial list update - up to several minutes for those with thousands of followers... poor bastards :D
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