Mostly There Now
- June 28, 2004
- 3 comments
OK, well I’ve moved most of the big stuff over to the new design. I only lack the Resume and Portfolio.
I know the site’s probably going to look a little rough on IE for PC right now. I’m right in the middle of finding a good PC to buy so I can test my designs on Internet Exploder. So until then, I’m kind of shooting in the dark as to how it looks in IE for PC. Please bear with me.
I’ve added quite a few new features to the site that I didn’t have before.
- The linkbox section over to the right is where I will post interesting links. There’s no theme to them. They’re just things I found interesting. It’s made with JavaScript/CSS. I didn’t make it. It’s called the V-NewsTicker. Very nice, but it’s entries are added manually. However, with ExpressionEngine, I was able to make it dynamic.
- Right below it you’ll see six small CD images. This is showing you what music I’ve been listening to in iTunes. It’s also dynamic and will change as I’m listening to my music. It’s run by iTunes Watcher.
- I now have live comment previewing. As you are typing in your comment, it will show you how it’s going to look. If you’re just using plain text, then it’s not that handy. However, if you’re using URLs and such, then it’s a nice feature.
- As I mentioned last night, my unwieldy archives are now tamed using JavaScript and CSS. It should be much easier to find your way around them. I do know there’s a little bug with Opera though. The arrow doesn’t work right, but this is a cosmetic bug so I can live with it for now. I know it looks and works right in all Gecko-based browsers, Safari, OmniWeb, Shiira and IE for Mac. This page will still take a little while to load though, since I’ve got so many entries.
- I have a simple, little PHP script now that emails me when Google’s spider goes through my site. Call me crazy, but I’d like to know when Google goes through my site. I found it at pMachineHowTo.
- Another nice EE trick I found at pMachineHowTo was how to display recent site searches. So now whenever you use the site search, a list of the ten most recent searches is shown. I took what I found at pMachineHowTo and added a little JavaScript to it so that you can click on the keywords of those searches and it will display the results for you.
- And finally I’m using Paul Burdick‘s Search Hilite EE plugin. This will detect when someone comes to your site from a known search engine. It will display a little message for the person and highlight all the instances of the word(s) on that page. Kind of a nifty little feature.
So that’s some of the new features. I’ve also added some extra functionality to the templates that makes managing the site easier for me.
There’s still room for some other things though. I will be cruising through other sites to find nice features that might come in handy. If anyone has ideas or knows of something they think is cool or would work well on this site, please let me know.
Thanks!
Congratulations. The redesign looks great! I quite like JustWatchTheSky’s idea of the “u heart, i heart” idea. Maybe something to get your readers participating in?