Blinking Page Title with Javascript | Flashing HTML page title

Now this is a very old practice that was probably popular some 5 years ago. Blinking / flashing your page title. But the thing is that I had to use it yesterday for a chat page. Every time a new message arrives we wanted to catch the users attention. So thats where it helps.

Where can you see the Title text blinking?

• If you have the page open your Title will blink. Either switch between two messages or One Blank and One Message switching.
• if you have that page open in a tab the you will see some text blinking on the tab name.
• If the window is minimised with the page in question as the active tab then you can see the text in the taskbar tab blinking.
• If you are using windows 7 then you need to point to your browser icon on task bar to see the blinking happening.

Here is the code.

defaultmsg=document.title

// functions to blink the title of the page with a message

function blinkmsg(message, count) {

    blinkingmsg(count, message, true);

}

function blinkingmsg(count, message, blink){

    if(blink){

        document.title=message;

    } else {

        document.title=defaultmsg;

        count-- // decrement the number of times left to blink

    }

    if (count > 0) {

        blinkTimer = setTimeout("blinkingmsg("+count+", '"+message+"', "+!blink+")", 800);

    }

}

function test()

{

setInterval('blinkmsg("drink.", 3)', 2000);

}

Now the above code will do three title flashes in 2000, miliseconds or 2 seconds. So you can do the calculation as per your needs. Do not bug the user too much. Thats not a good idea. Plus setTimeOut will use quite a bit a CPU time I suppose because of constant need to check and execute.

Use the Code well and let me know if anything is not upto your expectation.