Sunday, May 09, 2004

Do not adjust your sets

As you may have noticed we've had the decorators in and had yet another redesign. There are still a few features to pull across from the old template (like the Daily Picture bit) and the fonts & colours need to be decided on.



The main reason for this redesign was to speed up the page loading - it was getting very slow due to calling scripts from other sites (users online, comments, referrers, blogroll, comics etc). We've still got the scripts - I've rearranged the order things load now so that you shouldn't have to wait three weeks for the sidebars to come in when some of the slower scripts time out as they occasionally do.



Did I say sidebars? You'll also notice we are down to one of those now as well. This was mainly to make New Links look a bit better on smaller monitors but also because we used to have a lot of dead space under the sidebars.



As well as the speed improvements we have two other major changes due to this redesign. The icon code you have to cut and paste has been rewritten and is faster (natch!). The icon selector now generates the IMG code directly too rather than generating the javascript which generated the IMG code which will improve page loading times in the future. The downside of this is the length of the code you have to paste - the URL's for MSN Groups image storage are horrendous. Unfortunately we are the interweb's premier cheapskates and won't be paying for image storage in the near future so you will have to live with the URL shizzle. On the upside it now means you can play with the align and alt attributes to your hearts content. TIP: Select your icon with the combo, tab to the input cell and your icon code is highlighted automatically for you to CTRL-C. Much quicker than the previous method.



The second major change has removed the fixed font size - the View Text size stuff in IE works now so you can play with the text size settings for a more comfortable read. I guess that almost makes us a DDA compliant website now - we might even win a Bobby! Yay - New Links welcomes all our our readers regardless of the number of functioning eyes they have!



One last little snippet before I go and find some breakfast. We went to the Cully yesterday as planned and will have a full report with loads of pictures up soon - after I come back the match hopefully anyway. This is still to be written so don't hold your breath but it'll still be up quicker than Bungers' tunnel report from the previous trip to the Victoria Tunnel.



If only I could have been bothered putting links in here I could have regained the multi post title. Oh it looks like I did - and it's not just a lazy hack of an IMDB page either! :)

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