I thought I'd write up a blog regarding website updates that I've made recently. I have a great deal of time that I didn't have 2 months ago so I can start making some improvements to my site again and I have been browsing around it a lot lately looking for things to improve.
One example is I have brought back the ability to edit Message Board posts again. It was a page/process that I was too lazy to convert over, back in June when I re-designed my site. A couple weeks ago I converted that feature over. One thing I changed, is I completely threw out the stupid, separate page that people would have to use to edit posts. Instead I created a new, shiny, inline method of editing message board posts. Simply login, and browse to a thread reply and click the "edit" button, this will convert your comment into a textarea inline. After that just hit submit and it will update the comment. I stole this idea from Facebook, and I'm surprised more websites don't do something similar to this.
Also in my designs section, I re-did/deleted several pages. I noticed that a lot of my Geek Speak traffic was heading to my designs section after reading an article, and that section was done very lousy and more or less as an after-thought. Now when you visit the section, it will do a flashy popup box and the page actually contains screenshots of websites I've done rather than just a link to them.
Next, I made the videos in my Open Videos section widescreen. I noticed that YouTube has changed the size of all their video boxes on their site so I figured I would as well. I sort of like it, simply because it fills up my content space better and it looks a bit different than the normal YouTube embeded video box. Make sure to check out some of the new videos I've posted, most which are of me playing guitar (yes, I have a lot of free time, and I like it). On a side note, I've been trying to create some new music lately, and have also been revisiting a lot of songs I wrote in the pre-2005 days.
Another section I looked at on NealGrosskopf.com was my Photo Gallery section. I've noticed a lot of people that come to my website, visit that section. It's probably the second most used section. Depending on what browser you're using, you may see a totally cool hover box show up when you hover over a thumbnail image. I think I spent an entire night creating and tweaking this feature. It uses only CSS and originally I wanted to do it in an even more "CSS" way but the browser support isn't there yet.
Another thing I updated is, I completely ditched the "my photos" pages that were buried in the files section. Most of the photos were from 2005 or 2004 and were of my friends and I or the really early stuff of Emily and I. I decided I didn't want to just throw out all these pictures so instead, I "sucked" them all into my photo gallery. My next problem was I didn't want them to appear as if there were recent photos (because good god, they aren't) so I did some SQL hackery and got them stuck at the end rather than the front of the query. I think this section was also the pre-beta-alpha version of my Photo Gallery so it made sense to just incorporate it into that.
Finally, I have hopefully made my site more "IE6 friendly". I was never able to install Multiple-IEs on my computer because it hasn't been released for Windows Vista yet, but I recently found an even better program for testing in IE which comes with 5.5, 6, 7, and 8 beta! It's called IE-Tester and it is totally awesome. It allows me to open up different IE instances in separate tabs in one browser! This is especially useful for IE6, IE7 and IE8 which can't be installed simultaneously. I've also noticed that is a much more accurate representation of IEs rendering than Multiple-IEs was. My site looks pretty crappy in IE6 and I really don't know why anyone would go through the pain of using that browser, but yeah, I still get 10-20% of people using it.
I'll probably write up a blog next week summarizing Christmas and vacation, and also expect a totally, super, uber cool blog post after the first of the year summarizing 2008 related to my website and life in general.
Seacrest, out.
