Steve isn’t doing a year in review post, and I believe part of the problem is that he is hampered by his tools. I can sympathize, I felt the same way when I started. In fact, I used my Year in Review post as an excuse to finally do one of the things I put off when I re-designed this site: a revamp of my archives.1
Pages of full-content posts are great for reading through, but not so great if you’re looking for a specific post. The new archive pages allow you to visually scan a list of up to 100 posts (by date, title and topic) per archive page, and load in the ones you’re interested in on demand.
You can see the new archive pages in action by choosing any category or month from the sidebar. It also works for yearly archives (which have an URL like: alexking.org/blog/YYYY). I’ve left the daily archives (which have an URL like: alexking.org/blog/YYYY/MM/DD) as full-content views since a day’s posts isn’t too much content to scroll through.
I’ve also finally rewritten the inline AJAX comments (Note: this is the loading of comments for a post from the home page or an archive page, not posting of comments) code so that it’s faster, smaller, IE friendly and much simpler and lighter weight. I even created my very own spinner image… how very web 2.0.2
Still some refinements (and bug fixes?) needed, no doubt, but I believe it’s an improvement.
- This is another area I feel most blog engines could improve on. [back]
- Is that still
cool 
in 2007? [back]
Inline AJAX with a custom spinner? This I’ve got to try. 😀
Perhaps I’ve oversold the spinner, I just made one with colors to match this site. 🙂
For your web 2.0 throbbing needs: AJAX Loading gif generator
Are you planning to release some of your site’s plugins?
I’ve released a bunch of them. This is less of a plugin than it is a theme feature.
in one of your erlier articles you said you would send “your version” of ajax inline comments to the editor, askin if he will release it… ? 🙂
Instead of continuing to make changes to that plugin, I did a completely different implementation based on the archives implementation. The other plugin is still available as far as I know.
I suggest this is some kind of a “no, I won’t share my invention with you”, right? anyway, thanks for your quick reply and sorry for my sarcasm. I was just wondering if you could help me, in my german blog I added a commentform too to, but with some trubble handling the css, so I removed it. what I’m talkin about here is my general problem with umlauts in comments, cause they aren’t displayed… would you mind helping me? 😀 I really like your blog, nice technics, nice design and your skillz… awesome man! what about writing a mail, helping a fan of your work? 😉
Okay, I want to try this. I’ve been thinking of doing AJAX comments myself but I don’t see much actual benefit other than the fact that it’s cool.
Soo… either I’m doing something wrong or whatever, but no AJAX?
Mr. Biggles– no, that was exactly a “since I am not revising the other plugin, I have nothing to send to that plugin’s developer.”
thank you for all your great apps!
will you be releasing your rewritten inline ajax comments plugin?
I haven’t decided yet, the necessary theme changes are not simple. It would be quite a bit of work (really, a lot) to try to package it with proper instructions.
Just checking the coolness of this plugin in action. Love your stuff btw, so I’m prepared to be blown away. 😉
[…] also integrated my AJAX archives and comments into the RedMonk theme. This required some customization and additions to the Sandbox theme […]
simply great
nice system
Excellent