@jgable Perfectly valid point sir. I did actually think about this and started to go down this route initially, but there were a couple reasons why I didn't continue to do so:

1. Its the ugly debug page.
2. Both the update calls have their own distinct response structure at the moment, which didn't feel super clean to fit into one model.
3. Ideally we would check for updates at some regular interval, perhaps on load of the admin UI, in which case we would probably want to pop a sticky notification which would let you kick off the update. Because of the potential for the check being made server-side instead of client-side, and the fact that Notifications already have their own view I didn't feel like I was getting much reusable code out of creating a view for the update functionality.

So long story short: I don't know the future of this functionality and could really see it going either way. If we have more votes to do the stricter backbone implementation you've recommended, I'm more than happy to switch it over.

Don't get me wrong, I :heart: backbone as well and completely agree we should not have $.ajax calls *everywhere*, it just felt right for this particular instance.