Reminiscence 1

In an effort to celebrate the increase in PageRank for Geekie.org and a number of other FreddyWare assets, I have changed the wallpaper for Geekie.org to that of the site in February. The image is called Lime Light, and is royalty-free photography from stock.xchng . Thanks to stock.xchng for that!

In the future, there will be a number of “Reminiscence” posts where I relate something to a time in the past. Usually, there will be something that brings back memories of a prior time. In this case, Reminiscence 1 brings us back to the start of Geekie.org.

Another matter: in order to most effectively deploy wallpapers and CSS changes, I need to know what the screen resolution of my users are. That would help in resizing wallpaper photos to a suitable size so that it doesn’t take too long to download. Besides, it’s important that the wallpapers appear properly for any resolution.

That’s it for now.

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Yet more changes

Today marks a very important hallmark in the revisions to Geekie.org’s design. The Vistered Little theme has been used for many months, since the creation of Geekie.org, but went relatively unmodified until recently. Today, I have made changes to the theme that could justify its independent release as a WordPress theme.

Geekie.org’s theme is now no longer regarded as the Vistered Little design for several reasons.

Wallpaper

• the wallpaper switching functionality has been disabled (there is no option for the user to change the visual design)
• the default background will be switched every once in a while from our repository of royalty-free images
• all background images designed for 800 x 600 and above, preferably 1024 x 768
• all background images optimized for fast loading, especially on a broadband connection

Sidebars

• there are now two sidebars (left and right) rather than the original one (right) and the choice for a left sidebar
• each sidebar is now also widgets-compatible
• fully coded in VALID CSS
• new sidebars not dependent on location
• all sidebar locations compatible with Firefox 2.0+, IE 7, on Windows XP/2003 at 1024 x 768
  • if you have problems, please comment or e-mail us
• the sidebars are now loaded AFTER the main body (posts)
• enhances the loading time (delays in loading the sidebar do not prevent the user from reading the page)
• search engines pick up new content before considering the often-useless links of the sidebar
• some shifts between where widgets are displayed have occurred

Advertisements

• after some experimentation and research, leaderboard ad units (top of page) have been removed
  • they prevented more content from being shown
• a sidebar ad (skyscraper) unit has been added on the right side
• we will experiment with in-post ads and banners after the first post
• the rotation of ads has been temporarily halted for performance reasons

Other

• faster loading time with compression
• now fully VALID XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• CSS & JavaScript in process of being optimized
• no more waiting for the main content - the posts are always shown first, followed by the sidebars, and lastly the ads
  • before this change, ads would need to load first before the sidebars, followed by the content (we’ve switched it around entirely)
• less distracting advertisements
• more useful content viewable before scrolling
• users with JavaScript disabled or ad blocking can still enjoy full benefits (this was somewhat lacking before my modifications)
• font design experimentation is still ongoing

In summary

Users will find the newer interface a whole lot easier to navigate and use. It has been optimized for efficiency, not necessarily performance on our server, but ease for the client. There is now compatibility (full) for Internet Explorer as well as other major browsers.

Although the site has been designed for Windows XP & above, Gecko browsers, and the 1024 x 768 resolution, I am confident that a few minor changes can easily make the site compatible with other platforms and resolutions. It is not my intention to make this site backwards-compatible with Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer < 6, or Opera.

If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them.

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