Interfaces…
So as a web interface developer, I like to focus on big scary words like: interaction design, usability, user experience and information architecture. Think of it this way, if you had a whole bunch of information and things that you want the user to see and do, how would you make them see or do those things?
Obviously with blogs like mine, the goal is to get people to read the blog posts. However, since I switched to wordpress, I decided to include a lot more content into this site. I included the links to other people’s blogs specifically. Not only does it show the other type of blogs that I enjoy reading but its also there to promote. It’s all about the linky love baby! (read: link me! link me!)
So the challenge was that my side bar was getting quite long. In some cases, where blog posts were scarce, the side bar would actually be longer than the blog content and wrap underneath the footer of this site. Not good. So I decided to reduce the number of links to 5 for each side bar section. The technique worked well for the archives links because not a lot of my readers look at the older entries and displaying the recent 5 months was enough.
But it wasn’t acceptable for the links to other blogs (powered by del.icio.us) because the older links would get bumped past the recent 5 and get no linky love. No linky love = bad! I’d like to think that I’m an equal opportunity linky love person. So my challenge was to find a solution where all of the links were given the same opportunity to be displayed and didn’t take up space on the side bar.
Well this is what I did. I collapsed the menu for the links on the side to show only one link at a time then cycled through the different links in sequence. This, however, didn’t quite do it because the first links would still be displayed first and the last would take a while to be displayed. Remember, equal opportunity linky love was a priority. So I randomized where I started cycling from, this managed to give all the links a relatively equal chance of being displayed in the first little while. There you go, problem fixed. Hugs all around, linky love to all.
And that was my roundabout way to say, “Hey! Look at my pretty little animation script on the left right side”.
2:21 pm
Comments on this post
I don’t see the animation script? Where is it?
Are you talking about in the links section? It’s on the right!! Not the left!! Silly goose!
hahha sorry ching. The way I have the comments set up is that I have to approve them before it gets posted here because of spam, so that’s why your comments aren’t getting posted.
Also, it’s my right… your left
hey that’s pretty cool!
ooh fancy pants!
Cool script…. How come you didn’t enable the askimet plug-in included with WP 2.01? It should solve your spam problems unless you’re getting a load of false-positives…. or just plain ol’ not working. Oh wait, the API key. Nevermind.