Monday 16 May 2011

Updates

Right, first off, the third part of the video is almost done. Almost. I hope to finish it soon.

Secondly, I have had another article published, which I've backed up here.

Thirdly, I think I'm going to re-design the sidebar. Currently it's Javascript injecting into the DOM. I did that so that I could have one place to control it all from, and for the "expandy-collapsey" behaviour you need to use some kind of scripting language. However, people can disable javascript and some browsers may object to the way it is done, which means that some people are getting an inferior user experience.
So, I would prefer to use some kind of server-side scripting instead, though with javascript for the expanding - perhaps, due to what I described before, I can start everything off expanded, then collapse it appropriately on page load, so if anyone has JS disabled they will still see all of the links.
However, there is the possibility this will mess up the counter, as it might then count the server's IP rather than the visitor's.
Even if all of that works, I'm not sure how to embed a server-side return into the side bar which is, some of the time, controlled by blogger.
So, lots to look into.

I'll at least categorize the links better, too.

3 comments:

Jon Dowland said...

Another alternative for the sidebar would be to have the base HTML have the entire contents tree, all expanded, and use javascript to collapse it. Therefore, it would gracefully degrade if someone had disabled javascript to something that was still useful.

Jon Dowland said...

your link to the original article is broken

Joe said...

That was what I meant, though it wasn't too clear.