A Lot Going On
Published Tuesday, October 30, 2007 in Design, Javascript, Site News
You may notice it's been kind of quiet here for a while.
That's because during the past few weeks I've been busy moving from Stockholm (and Web Guide Partner) to London (and Yahoo!).
I've also been working quite a bit on the site, both back-end, front-end and on a new design.
I would like to make this new design the default style because I think it turned out quite alright, but it uses CSS3's multiple background-images which is currently only supported by Safari, and because only about 15% of my visitors use Safari and because it doesn't look good at all elsewhere I've kept aFrameWork as the default style for now. If you're on Safari and want to have a look then click here to apply "Green Twigs".
Hopefully soon Opera and Firefox will catch up and I'll make it the default style unless I'm already tired of it by then.
It's really annoying that while Safari understands multiple background-images and text-stroke, it does not understand a basic pseudo-class like :last-child. :first-child, however, is not a problem. If you see borders or things you think are out of place or shouldn't be there because that is the last item in any type of list then it's because of Safari's lack of support for the :last-child pseudo-class.
The absolutely stunning brushes that pretty much make the entire design are created by Jason Gaylor. Perhaps I went a little overboard with them, what do you think?
All the JavaScript's been re-written and is now object-oriented and modular. My main JS-class contains a few handy snippets of jQuery so I thought I'd share it with you (well, JavaScript is always shared really, but I'll provide you the link so you won't have to check my source =).
The functions you might wanna check out are autoPopulate (which toggles the value of form-inputs onclick), captchaRefresh (refreshes captcha images when you click them), maxLengthInput (adds "num characters left"-information below inputs and prevents user from typing more than certain amount), toggleTel (this is a specific one, it makes <span class="tel">555-555-555</span>s turn in to links that, when you click them, displays the number).
If you find any of that interesting then have a butchers at this: aFrameWork.js. Please note that aFrameWork.js is constantly under construction and I'm still working on some the functions i mentioned.
I've integrated Nicolas Martin's PHP-port of Dean Edward's JavaScript-packer in aFrameWork so if you check my JS-files you'll notice they're all minified.
This is done automatically when aFrameWork puts together the page you visit.
I've also cleaned up some of the back-end and improved my text-to-html function I use on all kinds of database output.
The about-page has had a bit of a brush-up and I've also added an accessibility statement. Everybody else has one so why shouldn't I? :P
A few new categories have been added and a lot of articles have been moved around. Some of the old plug-ins or javascript-functions have been removed with references to newer, updated versions. In some cases the newer versions aren't live yet, they should be soon though.
I've got some more stuff planned, a couple of jQuery plugins I've been meaning to write about and I thought I'd share the PHP-function I use to get 100% valid XHTML from my database. Always, regardless of what a user or I may input.
I've also switched to Mac. I'm not used to all the changes in keyboard shortcuts and quick-commands yet, but really impressed with everything I've seen so far. I understand why more and more are switching to Mac.
Check back in a week or so and I should probably have at least one of mentioned articles up.
Laters.
Comments
2 comments so far, why don't you post one too?
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 | View all comments by Si Jobling
Good work fella. At least one of us has got time to work on our own sites. I'm obviously spending too much time on work projects! ;)
Seriously though, you've done some nice work on the site. I've been able to witness the administration side of the site too and reckon you should pull it all together as an open source CMS for public consumption.
Thursday, November 01, 2007 | View all comments by Andreas
Hehe, cheers mate. Yea I think I may release it soon... just have to finish some of the more critical bugs/enhancements first.