After a really good day in terms of web development work (not so much in terms of revision though), I’ve spent a bit of time tidying up the JavaScript and WordPress plugins to make them a little better in terms of bandwidth and usability.

I decided that I didn’t want the hassle of fiddling with moo.fx every 20 seconds, so I’ve upgraded everything to use mootools; basically the same thing, but more modular and generally quicker to load and render. Unfortunately this meant that the script I use to display my photos, Litebox, wasn’t going to work any longer as it depended upon prototype.lite.

A quick google turned up Slimbox, which I have to say works absolutely brilliantly and is far simpler to deal with. By the same author I also found a reflections library for mootools, which effectively lets you do cool reflecty stuff like this:

Ducks are ace. Anyway. I played with the Slimbox code to make it a little more appealing than just a generic lightbox. Theoretically, everything apart from the live search should work, so let me know if it doesn’t.

The upside? The entire index page should load using less than 40k of bandwidth in total (excluding images), with a much better JS library behind it for significant speed improvements. That’s got to be good!

7:24 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS