Explore Box - Target Roadmap

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical

UPDATED: support for other blog engines? See end of post…

I’ve been working on the “Explore Box” these couple of days (when I should have been studying), and have done some updates to the explore box. Most notably, the color of the tabs have changed to better fit into the site’s color scheme. A litle spinner or loading indicator in the form of an animated gif was also added. There’s also a number of other little twitches here and there that I don’t really remember.

Here’s a screenshot of it in a variety of browsers, except for IE7 (click to enlarge).

Explore Box screenshot in different browsers

Target roadmap (or rather, todo list):

  • Get all data to load.
  • Try fixing for IE (priority) and Opera whoops, i mean Safari. This would probably mean resorting to divs for the tab. Will look around for examples. Also, fix IE min-height issue. I think I’d archive the standards-compliant version, before tainting it with hacks.
  • Increase usability: make selected links (show types) turn bold, and if user clicks the tabs, show some sort of message (the tabs are mouseover activated).
  • If there’s no similar plugin, consider tuning it into a plugin.

Right at the momment, the Explore Box is powered by a very lean code. There can be further optimizations in the PHP and SQL codes, but the point here is, it’s independent of the Wordpress codes. Heck, it even connects to the database by itself, and queries the wordpress tables. I’ll be during the final phase, I’ll be integrating it with Wordpress, and try to make sure it remains as lightweight as possible. Support for other blog engines? It’s just a matter of restructuring the queries. XML-RPC? I have no idea how it works, but I bet that it’ll be too slow.

Any feedback regarding the Explore Box, especially in terms of usability, is very welcomed.

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Permalink | January 1st, 2006

2 Responses to “Explore Box - Target Roadmap”

  1. Danny Foo Says:
    January 3rd, 2006 at 9:35 am

    Neat-a-thingy. :) If it works only for Wordpress, I might just move over. LoL! Happy new year man.

    p/s: I would change the blue though. Doesn’t really bring out the white text enough.

  2. Jonathan Ng Says:
    January 3rd, 2006 at 10:50 am

    I picked blue as it fits into the site. Perhaps a black colored text would be better…

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