About the playground
I like to play
With apologies to a mobile phone company... but I do. Playing is the best way to learn, and it's better that I play on this site than doing it with a paying customers'. I think it's important to try things out to see just what is possible on the web; I know that, in theory, almost anything is possible. But how hard is it? Is it a particularly good idea? How does it affect usability? This is where I try it out - and find out.
Experiments so far...
This site contains the following experiments - of which, at the moment, only the navigation is documented:
- Rollover dropdown navigation fade-o-matic - my name for what's a fairly basic rollover menu. It uses JavaScript to detect the rollover and to create the effects - based on the lovely bytefx library. Read more here.
- Click-o-tron blog change 2000 - the front page blog reader uses another very simple bit of JavaScript to change which blog latest entry is displayed. The blogs are read by two very simple bits of PHP which read XML files and present them as HTML. Again, bytefx is used for the fade effects.
- PHP includes - OK, so nothing big or clever about these. But they're incredibly useful and I like them, OK?
The wishlist
These are the things I'd like to do next:
- Fix the front page to work in Safari. At the moment I have no idea why it's not working. I think it's something to do with the way I've set the variables used for the fader, but I can't find out what exactly the problem is. If you know, please contact me.
- Automate the breadcrumbs. There's a way to do it. And soon I will. Honest.
- Content manage the whole shebang. Which will happen when I have a few weeks with nothing else to do. So no time soon. Because I want to write my own CMS. Eek.