JamesX

Oooo “What’s this?” I hear you saying… Well I found myself with a couple of free days between Christmas and New Year to tinker with my blog. It’s almost a yearly event now and every year I learn so much more it’s hard to pack it all into such a small space. Of course the latest technology I’ve been mucking around with is Ajax and the site is certainly making use of it now (try out the search or drool over the archives page) which makes for a much cleaner experience. So what else has changed?

Here’s a few of the big changes:

• The site is super fast - most of the images have been replaced with text and Ajax dynamically loads up a lot of the content without reloading the whole page.
• Tags and Asides - you’ve probably seen these before. Tags are basically like broad categories by which to search for posts (check out the tag cloud on the archives page) and Asides are small posts or quips that appear alongside the major posts.
• The forums are gone - they were only around for user management anyway and they were under constant spam attack so I’ve now migrated to WordPress for managing users. (Unfortunately you’ll have to sign up again because I can’t export your passwords from the old database - luckily signup only requires your name and email address!)
• The gallery is much more cleanly integrated.
• You get a nice random picture from the gallery on the homepage.

Everything else is pretty much how it was before. I’ve gone for a much more cut down page with the banner image up the top to provide all the flair - they seem to be all the rage on blogs nowadays. Anyway, I’d appreciate any feedback you have about the design and also any bugs if you happen to come across any. I’ve tested it in Firefox and Safari, not having IE readily available I can only hope it plays nicely. Fingers crossed. :P

Update: I’ve taken a look in IE and it seems pretty good. The only thing it has trouble with is the transparent tabs at the top and the PNGs. But naturally, what do you expect when you use Internet Explorer?