jQuery .length() with appended elements

I'm having a little problem with the .length() property. I'm trying to count the number of spans in each div with a same class. Those Divs are appended previously in the script. The funny thing is, if I alert the variable corresponding to the length, everything works fine, if I remove the alert, it doesn't. Never seen that before so any help would be appreciated :) Here is the code :

getTweets();
tweetCounter = function(){
    $('.entry').each(function(){
        var nTweets = $('.tweet', this).length;
        var infoPane = $('.infoPane', this);
        var tLink = '<a href="#" class="tLink" title="Tweets of the day">' + nTweets + ' Tweets that day</a>'; 
        infoPane.append(tLink);
        //alert(nTweets);   
    });


}
tweetCounter();

As I said, it appends correctly when I uncomment the alert. If commented, 0 is displayed on every DIV... Any ideas ?

Here's the getTweets function :

getTweets = function(){
var url = "http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/charleshaa.json?count=30&callback=?";
$.getJSON(url, function(data){
    $.each(data, function(i, item) {
        var fullTDate = item.created_at;
        var splitTDate = fullTDate.split(" ");
        var tMonth = splitTDate[1];
        if (tMonth == "Jan"){
            tMonth = "01"
        } else if(tMonth == "Feb"){
            tMonth = "02"
        } else if(tMonth == "Mar"){
            tMonth = "03"
        } else if(tMonth == "Apr"){
            tMonth = "04"
        } else if(tMonth == "May"){
            tMonth = "05"
        } else if(tMonth == "Jun"){
            tMonth = "06"
        } else if(tMonth == "Ju开发者_StackOverflow社区l"){
            tMonth = "07"
        } else if(tMonth == "Aug"){
            tMonth = "08"
        } else if(tMonth == "Sep"){
            tMonth = "09"
        } else if(tMonth == "Oct"){
            tMonth = "10"
        } else if(tMonth == "Nov"){
            tMonth = "11"
        } else if(tMonth == "Dec"){
            tMonth = "12"
        }
        var tDay = splitTDate[2];
        var tYear = splitTDate[5];
        var tDate = tDay + '-' + tMonth + '-' + tYear;
        var tText = '<span class="tweet">' + item.text + '</span>';
        //alert(tDate);

        var destination = $('#date_'+ tDate +'');
        destination.append(tText);

    });
});

}

Based on your comment. It pretty much looks like that the function which adds the .tweet elements does this asyncronously (maybe an ajax-request ?) If that is the case, the method does not block the code execution and again, this would bring your behavior.

What you would need to do in this case is, provide a callback function to the function which gets and creates the tweets. If that has finished, execute the callback.

function get_tweets() {
    var requests = [ ];

    for(var i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        requests.push( $.getJSON('/foo' + i + '.json', function(data) {
            // do something and create `.tweet` nodes
        }) );
    }

    return requests;
}

$.when.apply( null, get_tweets() ).done( count_tweets );

This is how it could look like in jQuery 1.5.2+. The get_tweets() function here fires 5 requests and stores the Deferred object in an array which is returned. $.when() will fire when all promises are fulfilled.

update

Here is how it should look like with 1.3.2:

getTweets = function( callback ){
    var url = "http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/charleshaa.json?count=30&callback=?";
    $.getJSON(url, function(data){
        $.each(data, function(i, item) {
            var fullTDate = item.created_at;
            var splitTDate = fullTDate.split(" ");
            // and so forth....
        });

        if( typeof callback === 'function' )
            callback();
    });
}

and then call it like

getTweets( tweetCounter );