Tagged News

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

I have finished my first update to the new news system. By popular demand, clicking a news article displays it right below the headline. Try it and see... the power of AJAX, yet again. With the layout change, I was able to up the default number of articles from 20 to 25. I also took this opportunity to change my website to HTML 4.01 Strict. This will have a positive impact on those using IE on Windows, as the site should be more consistent with Firefox and Safari.

The updated news engine has made its way into production. Sure, there's still a bit more to be done... but, it's already so much better than what was there before. It's been a while since the last update. Since then, there have been many minor updates (mostly security related). What do you think of the new news system? Let me know.

Webmail received a major update today. It now has a preview pane that is enabled by default. Check it out, to see what I mean. Meanwhile, I'm working on a news aggregator to replace the javascript feed on the Home Page. Work is moving slowly, but the end results will be fantastic.

The home page contents have been juggled around a bit. The weather code has had some slight changes as well. You may have noticed the Google ads are gone from the front page (if you didn't :D then you were blocking ads). I'm working on a new news aggregator, but it's slow coming. Other changes recently include minor updates to the Gallery and Webmail.