News as of February 19th

Another post that is too long for my asides category… today I’d like to present some major changes on h4×3d.com (this site).

0. Server moved!

First of all thanks to my old hosting company SURFCONCEPT (I made their surfy site), and big ups to DREAMHOST (who were really kind in answering every support request I had). Since I activated the Wordpress Cache-Plugin and fiddled with the code, reduced (even extremer) the graphics etc. the page loads really fast (under 6 seconds).

1. Search box added on all sites

When I was changing servers and using other themes for the time the site was shifted over, I found out that that I was missing a search box. I have added a link to the top navigation (above the graphic) which sends you to the actual search form in no-time.

2. Changed category template

Since the old template only showed the title, I felt like changing it.

3. Changed Javascript to reduce load-time

The old site was powered by scriptaculous and prototype. But hence they are quite fat (some 60kb+) I decided to rebuild the slider-routine using mootools (and moo.fx). I also tried it with the even smaller byte.fx, but I couldn’t get it going. Feel free to solve this riddle for me. Prototype and scriptaculous can be compressed to some extent using as I wrote some weeks ago, but moo is already compressed (option on their site), so I think the version I am running at the moment should be fine for all. I tested it on Firefox and Internet Explorer (6 and 7). At first I was using a DOM-Call,

Window.onDomReady(function() {
[...]
} );

but that seemed to cause trouble for Internet Explorer, thus I decided to use an ordinary onload-call:

window.onload = function() {
[...]
}

3. New Background for comments

Some users reported high annoyance and offense by the old background, so I changed it.
Internet Explorer Users see this:

Firefox users will only see this:

I scheduled the themes for Wednesday evening, Thursday morning and two Simpsons Episodes (latest) for Thursday evening.
Feel free to comment on the items above,
yours vaccationally (I guess I made that up),
jez