title: Rails 3 + jQuery: loading a div on interval isn't working
body: <p>My Rails app needs to retrieve an updated count from the server every minute.</p>
  
  <p>I'm attempting to have a javascript timer reload the specific div where I display this count.</p>
  
  <pre><code>    &lt;%= javascript_include_tag "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js", "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.1/jquery-ui.min.js", "application", "refresh-timer" %&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>You'll notice at the end I include my refresh-timer.js, which is just a single call:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$(document).ready( function(){ 
  setInterval(function(){ $('refreshable').load('/refreshable'); }, 3000);})
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That 'refreshable' object corresponds to this in my status.html.erb view:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="main"&gt;
     &lt;div id="refreshable"&gt;
         &lt;%= render :partial =&gt; 'refreshable' %&gt;
     &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Yes, there's more in the "main" div, but it's the div#refreshable that's of interest.</p>
  
  <p>Since the javascript is loading /refreshable, in my routes.rb I created a match:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  match "refreshable" =&gt; "events#refreshable"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>While I doubt that's strictly the right thing to do here, I'm trying to simplify things to find why the javascript timer isn't calling the action.</p>
  
  <p>For a test that my jQuery was set up right, I replaced the innards of the setInterval function with a call to alert.  That worked fine: every three seconds the alert popped up.
  I've also examined the page in Safari's development tools -- there are no javascript errors being reported, no extraneous html coding errors -- it's all very clean (and pretty simplified as I tried to figure this out).</p>
  
  <p>For now, as a fallback, I've added the meta call for an http-refresh every 10 seconds. Which allows me to watch in my development.log that this is the only call coming from the browser to the app.</p>
  
  <p>I'd love troubleshooting tips for javascript/jQuery more than anything else.  My current attempts to bugger things ups just to get something to fail and produce evidence of where things are going wrong also don't work!</p>