Recently, I started dabbling with a few new plugins, and even had a go at a bit of customisation of my own! So in that vein, here’s a few site changes that are now live on gerrod.com:

• Archives: I created my own archives plugin which takes up a lot less space on the sidebar. It uses ajax to lazy-load the archives by month, and jQuery to do all the nice javascript stuff. I should really look at pushing this into the WordPress Plugin Directory, but in the meantime, if you’d like a copy for yourself, you can download all the code here.
• Statistics: Statistics are back! I used to have these when gerrod.com was a home-grown piece of software, and now they’re all migrated across, too. You can get to the statistics page at any time via the nav menu, above.
• Photos: I’ve long been a fan of Picasaweb for photo albums, but I never liked that you had to “leave” gerrod.com in order to see the photos. Last week I found an awesome plugin called PWA+PHP which allows you to show your picasa albums all from within your own website; so once again, gerrod.com has it’s own photo gallery. The link in the nav menu has been updated accordingly!
• Shadowbox: I’m now using Shadowbox JS to display all image links within stories.

Enjoy!

Basically, I wanted something that was simple, easy to read, and which ironed out all the minor little functionality problems that I had with the previous theme (e.g. post author not visible, search didn’t show the whole article, etc). I think I’ve achieved all of these goals!

There’ll be a few more tweaks in the days to come, but for now, I hope you like it. Feedback welcome!

Oh – and as always, if your browser doesn’t force a stylesheet refresh, and the page is looking a little vanilla, try hitting Ctrl + F5 (or Apple + R for the Mac fans).

Suggestions welcome!

• Searching: Well, you’ve always been able to search gerrod.com (as far as I can remember), but now it has it’s own page, complete with tag cloud, and recent searches (to an extent). Check it out!
• Syndication: I got rid of the ATOM feed; lets be honest, does anyone even use ATOM? Instead I’ve replaced it with a comments feed. Your browser should be notifying you of the feeds available as you read this. Note that the address for the main feed has changed! If your browser isn’t showing you that an RSS feed is available, then it’s most likely you’re using a crap browser – so consider updating.

• Upgraded from ASP.NET v1.1 –> v2.0
• Lots of new features powered by Javascript (try rolling over a name on the “Recent Comments” list, or check out the photo albums)
• Commenting now enabled for photos
• Much more flexible tagging structure
• Reader profiles (more on that later)
• Fixed the bug whereby pressing ENTER after a search resulted in a blank page
• A fresh new skin (still under development, i.e. more changes to come)

Unfortunately though, things seem to have somehow been mashed in the upload process. Files somehow magically changed their names during the transfer. I’m not sure what went wrong there, but things that should have worked off-the-bat, simply didn’t. I think I’ve fixed most things, but please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work as you think it should.

Oh – but as always – if it’s simply that things don’t “look right”, try hitting Ctrl+F5. I always have problems with browser caching.

* Not a real event

Also, the target attribute is invalid in strict doctypes which immediately prevents my site from qualifying. So rather than go through and remove all my target=”_blank” attributes, I’ve changed to XHTML 1.0 transitional.

For those who are interested, here’s a list of new features and what-not.

• The most obvious – an all new look and feel (skin).
• New photo albums and album management, written by yours truly! (Previously I was using a horrible free component that Bender found on CodeProject.) I haven’t got around to re-uploading all the old albums (or even many photos into the ones that I’ve put there), but that will all come with time.
• New searching functionality. At the moment I’ve only written 1 search provider, which searches the articles, but soon I’ll upload the photo, link, and event search providers. Basically that means that pretty much everything on the site will be searchable.
• Story splitting, which allows a summary to appear on the main page with a “Read more” link to see the rest of the story.
• A new object mapper – instead of ORMapper I’m now using NHibernate.
• A new database server – finally I’m powering off MSSQL instead of Access, and boy does that add a whole bunch of extra speed.
• Changed from HTML 4.0 Transitional to XHtml 1.0 Strict. This means the site should be more cross-browser friendly, and it also means that the “HTML 4.0 Valid” image is no longer true .
• Lots of little bug fixes, and plenty of new Admininstration functionality.

Enjoy!

So if you can’t access the site sometime over the next week, that’s why – but don’t worry, it will be back sooner than you know!

Secondly, I completely re-wrote my admin site. This one probably won’t have much impact on everyone, but hey I think it rocks so I thought I’d share anyway .