I’ve been working on something called BottomToolBar. It’s a small piece of JavaScript that drops a scrolling bar into the bottom of your browser window – the kind you see on news channels, the one that runs along the bottom of the screen with headlines and images.
I thought it might be useful for websites.
How it works
The bar sits at the bottom of the viewport, fixed in place, always on top of everything else. Content scrolls through it from right to left (or left to right, your call), separated by images – usually a logo or icon. It pulls text and images from a server, so you can update what it shows without touching the page itself.
Users can drag it around if they want. There’s also a close button, and the bar remembers whether someone has dismissed it, so it doesn’t keep bugging the same person.
What you can configure
There’s a control panel where you set things up. You can:
- Create tagged messages for different sections of your site
- Pick the separator image
- Decide how many times each message appears
- Choose scroll direction
- Set the background colour
- Pick where the separator image sits within the text
- Control how long each message stays visible
- Decide whether users need to log in to use it
- Moderate messages before they go live
There’s also basic analytics – it tracks impressions and how many people close the bar.
Why I built it
I was looking at how news sites and TV channels use that bottom ticker to push updates without interrupting the main content. It’s unobtrusive but persistent. I figured the same idea could work for websites – announcements, alerts, promotional stuff, whatever.
Gmail’s chat bar does something similar with its floating window, so the concept isn’t entirely new. But this is simpler, lighter, and designed to be dropped into any site with minimal setup.
Get it
The code is on GitHub: shafiqalibhai/BottomToolbar