Introducing, the Explore Box
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Finally, as promised weeks ago, I’ve update/upgraded the site a little. The “Recent” box is now upgraded to an “Explore” box. There was originally a “Expore” text there but it made the wholoe area look so cramped. The “Explore” box, is party inspired by Binary Bonsai, one of my favourite sites when it comes to usability/navigation.
As for compatibility, I’m not sure whether the “Recent” box works with IE as I didn’t really test it out, but I think it probably didn’t. I just tested it in IE recently and the whole “Explore” box looks pretty f***ed up. I might do some further work with the CSS to get the tabs to display properly in IE. Not sure whether it works in IE7.
Well, let me explain how it basically works. I use AJAX to query the required data, and get it back in XML format. I then use JavaScript to parse that XML into (X)HTML to be displayed. I’m guessing the main reason the AJAX part doesn’t work in IE due to the XML parsing scripts, as I sourced it from Mozilla’s developer site. I’m considering formatting the data into (X)HTML on the server side, and inserting it directly to the output tag. That’ll save a lot work, but it’s the lazy man’s way.
Right now, the “Explore” box doesn’t load any other data than the “Recent” box. I havn’t done the PHP scripts for those data yet. I’ll try to get some feedback on the overall interface for the “Explore” box first. Considering the amount of links that I need to place into that area, I think that’s the best I could do. What do you think?
Tags: ajax, javascript, jnls.net
