For the drop down menu at the top, I started out with an open source
.NET menu system entitled
skmMenu. Unfortunately, changing our DocType
in our web page to tell the browser to use a strict rendering method
and trying to conform to web standards caused the menu’s drop down to
behave erratically. While I would normally delve into the code and try
to fix it myself, I didn’t want to spend the time when I had another
easy alternative on my hands. What I do now instead is use an HTML list
and use CSS to convert the bullet items to a drop down menu. Here’s a
sample of the HTML:
And with just a reference to a CSS style, it changes it from
the traditional bullet list that we are all familiar with to a nicely
formatted drop down menu.
I’ve always hated the fact that text in programs such as Photoshop and
Flash look a lot better than HTML text. Because HTML text doesn’t have
any anti-aliasing, it will never look as good. There’s a great text
replacement tool titled
sIFR that I use to generate those nice looking
headlines. If you don’t have Flash, you get the traditional HTML text
but for those that have Flash enabled, you get very clean looking
headlines. All the replacement is done using an SWF with the font I
specified and a javascript include that has the code to do the
replacement.
One of the biggest challenges was making benchmarks a lot
easier to do. Previously, I would put all my test scores in an Excel
worksheet and generate graphs from that. I’d then take the graph and
put it into Photoshop to create a GIF. It’s a tedious process and I
knew there had to be an easier way. I spent a lot of time on the
database structure to allow me to enter in a wide variety of
combinations of variables that make up a benchmark. So I can add
benchmarks for different systems, product patches, video drivers, and
picture quality features to name a few. There’s even support for doing
time based benchmarks with a line graph rather than the traditional
average bar graph should I decide to go with that benchmarking
approach. With that in place I looked for some graphing utilities.
There are some nice free ones and some great open source ones but I
decided to do something simple and leverage the .NET GDI API and write
some objects to draw them on the fly. They do have some nice methods to
create some effects such as the gradient on the bars themselves. The
code wasn’t that much and I’ll be continuously upgrading the object to
add more charting features. Since branding on the site can change, I
can now change the benchmark branding and it will be reflected by all
the past ones I’ve done. It’s actually one of the things in the
redesign that I am most proud of. You’ll be able to see this in a week
or so as I put the data in to replace the old images.
AJAX is the big buzzword being thrown around lately. If you
don’t know what AJAX is, it stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
By leveraging the XMLHttpRequest object that’s supported by most modern
browsers, you can render portions of websites with data without having
to refresh the browser. I’ve done something like this many years ago on
a web application I worked on where I displayed information from a
server in real time without having any interaction from the user using
DHTML. I had an object that would subscribe to a messaging service that
would listen to incoming messages and display them as needed. AJAX is
taking off now and I decided to add some of the technology into the
site. If you go to the About US page, you can see it in action when you
click on a writer’s name. What happens is there’s a JavaScript call
that requests the data. When it finishes retrieving the data, another
JavaScript function displays the retrieved data all without rendering
the rest of the page which doesn’t change. You can also see this in
action when displaying articles written by a writer and changing
between review, preview, and articles. And the big demonstration of
this feature is when you switch article pages with the arrows. There’s
still the drop down with the page numbers and the normal submit button
just in case.
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