December 2007

The Site Authentication has been optimized and rewritten as a module. This simplifies management of the site - with a minor speedup. The Weather System has always allowed searching by city, but now it handles "city, state" as well. The "more quotes" page now has 15 random quotes, and a quote search function. The News System has improved the time display in the list, and has an auto reload feature. By default, it will auto update the news articles every ten minutes. This setting is configurable. The Home Page and News System both have improved image preloading on them…

The news system has received another round of updates. What you'll see: new smaller loading indicator, cleaner display that shows more articles (alternating row shading & rows slightly closer together), enhanced article parsing to reduce wasted screen space, articles selected by clicking in row (not just article title), background highlighting for article selection, article time display goes back 24 hours in headline list, time display in article (xx minutes ago) now calculated when browser loads (not when feed loads), better use of accent colors. What you won't see: simplified…

This update completes the most critical pieces of the new news system. Your settings are now saved. Any options configurable in the news system will be saved in cookies on your computer. Category filtering now re-queries the database to return as many matching articles within your limit as possible. For example, if you want to view 25 articles only from World. The new system will query the top 25 World articles. The old one would have only displayed the World articles out of the top 25 of all articles (maybe 2 or 3)…

The News System has undergone another modest update. The search is now always visible. The tool icons were updated. Articles that were opened now remain open when searching and refreshing news. There is a Close button on the right side of any opened articles. The "Please Wait..." dialog is nicer. The article count is now at the bottom of the display. I have more changes planned... :D