Feedback needed, motherf**kers!
Over the past few days, I revamped my website. Let me know what you think. What works? What doesn’t?
It was time for a new aesthetic. The design is based on work by Styleshout, always a source of excellent free designs.
Prototype and Script.aculo.us were replaced by jQuery, LightboxJS was replaced by Slimbox.
I’ve now also taken a very different approach in relation to ‘membership’ of this site and commenting. I’ve integrated the very interesting, possibly excellent, Google Friendconnect, which now is supposed to take care of article ratings and comments. Besides this lowering the threshold for users to become a ‘member’ of this site, I hope it will also reduce the amount of spam comments I’ve been getting, specifically recently.
There are no more ajax requests on the site. It seems that using jQuery and some unobtrusive javascript also does the trick. One advantage of this is that photo collections with articles now don’t need to be paged to see all photos.
The archive has been revamped as well. The calendar view, though very pretty, was taking too long too load, regularly timing out.
In related news, I’ve also closed a few of my websites over the past few weeks. Babasprojects.com now redirects to the assignments page on this website, 10GoodReasons.com now redirects to ComeAndPlayWith.us and StreetsOfIran.com has been taken offline. Travelhog.net, I suppose the website which ignited my love for web development, has been retired, redirecting users to the Travelhog group on oneview.com (and, incidentally, I’d suggest using Diigo, not oneview, for something like this in the future). You can still make your bookings, now from travelogues page on this site.
So, do let me know what you think. I’m curious.