zarjay.net

I admit it; my site has been pretty dead for a while. I’ve been busy finishing my junior year of college, working full-time at a web development company during the summer, and completing side projects for friends and myself. Being a webmaster for each of the student organizations that I’m a part of and taking on web projects from friends, I never devote enough time to my own website. But I’ve been slowly working at it, nonetheless. Staying in Milwaukee for the summer (instead of on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where I have less-than-stellar 56K Internet access) has helped give me more chances to update the site. The changes I’ve made so far have been somewhat subtle, but here’s a summary of what I’ve been doing:

Most of my changes have revolved around my gallery. I made a new template for it, since the old one was getting, well, old. I plan to incorporate the new theme to the rest of the site, but I’ve been focusing on other things, such as adding Slimbox effects to my gallery. Each album now has Lightbox slideshow support. After implementing it, I noticed that constantly querying the database for the list of images with every AJAX request soaked up too much CPU resources. I didn’t exactly want to scrap the cool slideshow effect that I spent a few hours laboring over, so I added caching support so reduce server load. With all the teaks I’ve been adding to Plogger (the app that runs my gallery), it’s beginning to become significantly different from the original install. Then again, custom tweaking never hurt anyone. :)

I’m also getting ready for expanding my projects section. I’ve already made an update to the Slimbox WordPress Plugin page. The latest version of Slimbox now uses the latest version of Mootools. Unfortunately, this increases the total size of the script a bit. I’ve also changed my JavaScript compression tool of choice. The original version of my script was packed using a base62 encoding of some sort. (I don’t remember which one I used, but I’m sure it’s either the Dean Edwards’ Packer or something similar.) While I never experienced any problems with the packed version of my plugin, after running into trouble with other packed JavaScript files and after reading about possible performance issues to consider, I’ve decided to use a safer, simpler approach to JavaScript compression: Dojo ShrinkSafe. It doesn’t compress JavaScript files as much as base62 encoded compression techniques do, but at least I never run into any errors when using the compressed script it produces. (I ran into so many issues when running the Dean Edwards packed script in my gallery that I just gave up and used ShrinkSafe.) However, just so users have the right to choose, I’ve left the smaller, older version of my Slimbox plugin available for download.

With all the experience I’ve been gaining as a professional and hobbyist web designer/developer, I’m learning a lot of new tricks that I can add to my website. I’m especially excited about working with JavaScript, as I’ve never liked having to deal with its cross-browser compatibility issues. Thankfully, thanks to frameworks such as jQuery and Mootools, dealing with cross-browser compatibility issues becomes (almost) completely transparent. PHP is also becoming less foreign to me. CSS and XHTML have never been trouble, but perhaps I may have to rethink my strategies if HTML5 begins to take off.

Until I make more updates, passers-by can check out pictures of my latest adventures in my gallery.