Phewf! What a friggin overhaul! I was getting very bored with the old site and had been squatting on a new design idea for a while, so I finally gave in and wrote my own WordPress theme. A few months ago, I was very much inspired by Scott Schiller’s work (I even borrowed some of his code) and was determined to incorporate some DHTML animation in my new design. If you missed the DHTML animation when the front page loaded, you can close your browser windows (to kill the PHP session) and open a new one to https://bradt.ca/.
A minor release of WordPress (2.0.1) was recently released, so I upgraded it. A few of the annoyances I noticed in the 2.0 release are gone now, which is great! Next on the WordPress front for this site will be installing a tagging plugin. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin appears to be pretty good despite it’s old-school wrestling reference.
This site revamping has been by far the most Javascript intense project I’ve worked on so far. The live search implementation (above) is my first crack at AJAX and Scriptaculous. I am not a fan of using a large library like Scriptaculous for a few transition effects and a bit of AJAX, it seems like overkill. But on the other hand it is very easy and quick to develop with, so it saves quite a bit of time. Next thing to do with AJAX will be to implement comment loading and comment posting. It’s so nice when you don’t have to leave the page to reveal comments and post your own.
Please leave me your comments about the new design and the live search implementation. I am anxious to hear some feedback!