Site Update Complete

Hi everyone, not that I imagine that thousands of readers were shocked to see [PHP][1] errors and were woefully impacted by my rather spontaneous site code update decision.

I think that I’m pretty much done. I cleaned up the markup within the PHP code so that I could have more power to manipulate the layout / coloration directly.
I added some javascript savvy so that the very long sidebars are now shortened by default (at least in Firefox and Apple’s Safari they are). I think it makes for easier reading. Update My girlfriend said that she thought that the long sidebars looked better. So, I wrote a function to randomly expand one of the sidebar boxes so that visitors would get the idea that they could expand the boxes. Internet Sucky Browser Explorer can’t handle this function well so i’ve put it in hibernation until IE7 comes out (which promises to be ever so slightly less sucky).
I also got rid of the “…” as the character for expansion and replaced that with “↓ and ↑”.
I used some DOM manipulation code to do the images from Amazon load in the background, you don’t see it when you first visit the site, but it speeds up the load a little bit.
I cleaned up the About section, I guessed with my life having changed so much lately it was worth freshening that content a little bit.
The glossary has been cleaned up too.
I removed the consumed media section. I wasn’t updating it, I don’t think anyone cared, and frankly, I wouldn’t blame them for not.
Added some new groovy CSS so that I could have a ’terminal looking’ terminal as seen in this post.
As always, I designed this page to Firefox, so if you have issues with other browsers they may be a bit behind in implementing some of the features I used.
On the back end, I updated my Wordpress code so that I was no longer hacking up the original code, but just overlaying my cosmetic changes onto the pristine source. This should make upgrades a bit nicer.
Added an inline more utility so that instead of clicking “read more” doing another server query and reload, it just expands within the browser. I thought that was a nice feature and much thanks to Chroder for writing the plugin. I didn’t want to have to write more DOM code today.

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