Tinkering

I’ve had a pretty useless archives page for some time. Recently I changed the format so that the years are listed vertically with the month links trailing along horizontally next to the years. A bit of an improvement. But I didn’t find that particularly useful because even I didn’t like having to jump back and forth between pages. Web site viewers do not like to jump between pages if they can avoid it. (it could be a useful study to find out how much of our lives are wasted waiting for pages to load) So. What to do.

I knew what I wanted, but, when I started my search yesterday, I had no idea what to call what I was looking for. As my search narrowed, I discovered that what I wanted was an AJAX script. I’ve heard a lot about AJAX from the cool kids, but didn’t know much about it. I still don’t, really, but I can tell you that after tinkering with a script for several hours, I know a lot more about it than I did before. It’s a geek language that ‘does things efficiently.’ Good enough description for now.

After I had the script in place and all the bugs worked out it was a beautiful sight. Except, it was huge. And that made the archives page crawl. Well, that’s not good. By sheer luck, I found a tiny AJAX script that Rick Ellis (the guy behind Expression Engine) wrote (he probably wrote it on the back of a napkin while he stood in line at the bank or something) and it was a beauty to behold. So simple and elegant.

Anyway, now if you go to my complete archives page, when you click on a month, the script grabs the month’s entries from an external page (that pulls the entries from the database) and displays an entire month of entries on the page. No messing around with jumping back and forth between pages. To me, that’s a useful archives page. One that even I like to use. There’s something to be said for this AJAX thing.

Which brings me to another point. The drop down photographs (using a DOM script) don’t work in the archives. They, unfortunately, do sweep the viewer away to another page. I need to insert the DOM script into the external page that calls the month’s worth of blog entries, but, because of the 7 different skin templates going on, the script needs to be customized to each. I’m not even sure how I’d do that. There may be a way to script this, but my skills aren’t equal to it yet.

I think skins might be on their last legs around here. They get in the way. They make things too complicated. I don’t want complication. I’m still thinking about it.

On another fronts, if you are ever in the market for a new domain, I would vigorously discourage you from hooking up with DomainName.com. Rotters. I have a domain about to expire, I want to transfer the registry to someplace else. For two months they have refused to cooperate. They are (somehow) accredited with ICANN which means they are well aware of ICANN rules that say they MUST let me transfer my domain registry. This is not a hidden clause. ICANN even addresses this issue on their FAQ that is freely available on their website. However, DomainName’s terms of service contract says “There is no facility for transferring registered domains from one registrar to another.” Well, establish one! It’s the rules, dudes. And answer your phones or answer your email once in a blue moon, too. That would be nice.