In a continuation of the first few steps to improve and expand my website, I have selected, implemented, and partially tweaked a new design that will meet my needs in the future as well as satisfy my desire for the coolness factor.
What was the main motivation for the new site design? Microsoft IE 7. Thanks Microsoft, your new browser completely choked on my old WordPress theme. It’s for the better, though, because it moved me to action, and this new design is awesome!

I came this close to dropping WordPress and going with BlogCFC. Not so much out of a dislike for WordPress, but due to discomfort with PHP and WordPress templates in general, compared to thorough knowledge of ColdFusion. Alas, I stuck with WordPress for a few reasons: (a) It forces me to tinker a bit with PHP. It’s a good thing. (b) WordPress has a billion themes, and I’m picky at how my site looks. (c) BlogCFC just feels a bit too plain sometimes. This is not an insult to Ray’s fine work.

So here I am, with a fine theme called “Scary Little” by The Scary Little Monkey. It features some fun JavaScript effects, a great stylish look, and let’s not miss the AJAX-driven search, which is great fun!

I’ve tweaked it a bit to include my tags (aka categories) in the menu navigation and to make pages (not blog entries, but the CMS pages) fill the whole site width, with no side menu.

Future tweaks I hope to get to: (a) A new header graphic that is flash-driven to incorporate just a tad of stylish animation, perhaps even an occasional image change; (b) Tabs at the top of the header, for moving between the different major website sections (I’ll expound in a moment); (c) Either a better editor or tweak the default editor.

The site will be expanding. It is not going to be just a blog. Some ideas I have for expansion (probably about in order of seriousness): (a) A front-end site for my freelance development work; (b) A Trac-driven projects page, to be used with my freelance work; (c) Finally set up my “Land of Nazin” story blog! (d) An Apple Computer history wiki site. Yes, I know there are some out there, but I want to make one that is really nice. After all, I’d enjoy the process of making it since I enjoy reading about it.

Stay tuned!

I just got wind of Aptana today. At first glance, I would describe Aptana as a new IDE focused on web development, especially with an eye to Web 2.0 development. In other words, it has strong support for JavaScript-oriented code insight for AJAX development.

Aptana’s strength, then, from what I can see in some of the screencasts, is that is supports HTML and JavaScript and CSS all in the same editor, providing outline insight and even error detection with all the code intermixed. This seemed pretty nice.

Being that it is still in its infancy, I’m hard-pressed to try it at this time. After all, Eclipse can do most of what Aptana claims to do with various plugins, and much more. The thing, though, is that Aptana is also offered as a plugin for Eclipse itself. I actually just downloaded JSEclipse and the ATF today, but if I find these mediocre, maybe Aptana would be worth a closer look.

Oh man. I am bubbling with geeky excitement. I love CSS. I love AJAX. Look. I’m dancing.

Okay, so I stole the dancing line from Tom Yager. But only because it is so hillarious and yet appropriate. I plan to continue using that line.

But what I’m so excited about is an absolutely awesome site called 24 Ways. This is a great site to take the average Joe Developer and transform him into a web demigod! I haven’t had a chance to read the articles closely yet, but they cover a wide span of topics (from CSS to DOM to AJAX and beyond), and the articles have great links to other sites that are just as rich in great lessons and examples in modern web development.

It’s enough to make my geeky heart skip a beat.

Wow, this is something to get excited about. Someone has bundled up AJAX in a pretty package easy to use with ColdFusion!

Check it out: CFAJAX.

For those of you unaware, AJAX is Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Imagine the dynamic capability of JavaScript, but with the power of your server-side functionality in ColdFusion. That’s what CFAJAX will give you!

For instance, in the past, if you wanted a list of information that would dynamically change depending on user input, what would you do? Your ColdFusion page would load ALL the information into the page, and you’d use JavaScript to filter/display the information. This can be slow if the data is large, or if it takes a long time for your server to process it in one large clump. With CFAJAX, you can create just the shell of the page, and your AJAX code would pull the appropriate data from ColdFusion, based on user input, as needed. It is not dissimilar to Flash remoting, except without having to use Flash!

I am excited about this. I can already think of an app where this will be useful. I have an app that, depending on which user is logged in, may have a page that loads extremely slow, because it has to pull a lot of data, all of which is hidden based on default form options. So it seems like a needlessly slow-loading page. However, I had to load the data into the page, because if the user unchecks a certain checkbox, this list of information must be displayed. With AJAX, I don’t have to load the information; I can wait until the user unchecks the checkbox, and THEN load the information at that point, but without having to do a screen refresh. Can’t wait to do this next week.