I’m always working on new ways to make the site interesting, so today I did a bunch of programming work on the site to make for a more functional and elegant user interface. I want this site to become as easily navigated as possible, so I’m always looking on new ways I can do things to speed things up and keep the navigation as fluid as possible. I will be working a fair bit on AJAX modifications over the next month or so to perfect the site’s functionality.
The main feature I added is a Most Popular Posts list at the bottom of each post list page including the home page, the categories and the archives. I’ve actually made many other changes over the last few days, but most of them are on my end so you probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
If you read the previous post you may have noticed the pictures link to larger versions. WordPress has a hard-coded thumbnail system that frankly sucks pretty bad, so I made some changes that allowed me to make the thumbnails bigger so you could get a reasonably sized preview that linked to a larger image. I also changed the post lists to show the excerpt without an image and then load the first image from the content dynamically instead of using the more tag that’s built in to WordPress. At first glance this may seem like a rather useless change to accomplish the same thing, but what this did was allow me to code the image in the post lists to automatically link to the corresponding post, while in the post itself the image can link to something entirely different, like a larger version for example.
I also implemented a Lightbox system, so the images open in an easy to understand overlay box with the image’s quote, if available, and you can even navigate all the images in the post through next and previous buttons, like a photo gallery. I’m always doing what I can to make Nerd Culture better. If you’ve got any suggestions, complaints or bug reports feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.
