The Front Page Is Live!

Posted on by Jordan

As previously mentioned, we have a new front page!

Note: I the following while waiting on sign-off on the image set being used. What I didn’t know at the time was that the slide show has a nasty image load delay related hiccup, and that my “just drop in files” slide show plan only works if the image is exactly 800 / 600 px. Other than that though, WHOOHOO IT’S LIVE 🙂

Initially I was planning to build the look from scratch, but I quickly realized that things like picking colors are not my strong suit. Also I wanted to get onto poking at some sort of scripting so I fell back to the go-to “hack up a free template” option I have used in the past. I am pretty happy with the resulting look.

As for the scripting, you may be thinking “it’s just a slide show, I have seen those before.”  Yes, I am sure you have, but I built this one from scratch! It only has one transition, and I think I may be causing the javascript engine to work a little harder than other implementations do. On the other hand, I can just dump images into a folder on the server and they will instantly be included in the slideshow.

My initial plan for the slide show was going to be some sort of AJAX + JQuery thing, but directly drawing to the canvas sounded more interesting. The downside I suppose is that this probably doesn’t work at all on IE6.

The end result though, is that we have a new front page, it isn’t as ugly as the one I did last year, and because it features pictures Heather is about 500% happier with it than the old one.

 

-Jordan

Quick Link, For A Long Read

Posted on by Jordan

I really hope to get something more substantial posted later this weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to post something I read.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

A few notes:

  1. It’s rather depressing, I hope he is wrong about some of this
  2. It’s really long, I read it in bites over the course of a day
  3. As I reflected on it, I have a huge amount of respect for someone putting that together. There is a lot of research there, plus interviews.

As a side note, if you use Firefox (and you should, although I haven’t even managed to sell Heather on that yet) Delicious has a plug-in you really need to be using. Being able to bookmark anything you think you may want to look at later is wonderful, and you just attach meta-tags so finding links is typically easy.

-Jordan