davegruen.com

Fooling around with a Twitter widget…

Now you can check out the BolderImage Web Design page on Fracebook:

Today I added specially formatted pages for the iPhone/iTouch.  I only added pages for the latest news and individual news article pages, maybe some day I’ll do the rest of the site, but for now, we only needed the two main pages.

The first step was to detect if we are using an iPhone. 

dim sDevice
sDevice = LCase(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT"))
if InStr( sDevice, "iphone" ) then
    Response.Redirect "iphone.asp"
end if

Once I detect the iPhone, we just redirect to a new page that is just formatted for the iPhone.  I could have gotten fancy and had the same page render differently, but I figured it was easier to just have them go do a different page.  Since the screensize is 320×480 in portrait mode, we need to make sure that the whole page doesn’t exceed 320 pixels.  You can do that through a special meta tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320">

Now that we’ve detected the iPhone and set the page width, the rest is just a matter of formatting on the page.  You can see the result online at: http://www.comicbooknews.us/iphone.asp

I actually had a few hours tonight to work on the site.  Most of the pages are now reskinned.  I have a few oddball pages that aren’t skinned yet, but I’ll get to those in the upcomming days.  Unless there’s any major problems tomorrow, I’ll roll the new pages into production.  

Stay tunned…

Building a better http://www.comicbooknews.us…

I finally have the homepage template completed.  The lightbox tool that I was using wouldn’t work in the new design – so I had to scrounge up another one.  I found a great example online at: http://leandrovieira.com/projects/jquery/lightbox/.  The jquery toolset is pretty good and this is a great example.

Now that the homepage template is done, I can move on to the rest of the site.  I’m going to start with the specific news article page and move from there.

More updates on day #9…

This is the first post using the iPhone WordPress app. While the keyboard on the iTouch leaves a lot to be desired, the app is pretty cool. Now if only I had enough important things to say to warrant a mobile blog app.

Well, I had a few hours this evening to work on an updated design for the site.  I made a lot of progress.  I still have to fix the pesky AJAX control for the main news story popup window.  I’m looking forward to rolling out the functionality to the rest of the site.

So far, I like the design.  It still is pretty utilitarian, but I like it:

Old Site

New Site

So, the next step is to fix the AJAX popup window, clean up a little CSS, and then roll it out to the rest of the site.

The homepage is just about complete.  I still have some HTML warnings to clean up, but I’ve got the functionality in place (and things are behaving pretty well in both IE and firefox).

So, what I have left on the homepage is:

• Clean up HTML warnings
• Fix the AJAX popup window for the main story’s image.
• Tighten up the right column a bit
• Review ad placement
• Review SEO – I think we’re 99% of the way there.
• Create a new logo.

Once I am done with that – I can move forward on the rest of the site.

I made great progress the last 2 days on the updated comicbooknews website.  I had a good couple of hours this weekend to work on it.

I’ve got the navigation pretty solid now.  Rule #1 when developing a new website is to make sure you’re testing in IE and FireFox the whole time instead of going down a long path, only testing on one browser.  The navigation is solid and I’ve added an enhanced "Featured Stories" section.  The functionality is similar to the existing site, but I added a little more SEO and fixed the randomly pulled story.

The Google Ads are in place, although I may swap out the ad list on the left side for something else, but the rest of the ads are in place.

Tommorrow I need to see if I can fix the main story popup ajax window in IE.  It works great in FireFox but not IE.  After that, I’ll add the next 9 stories to the right of the main story.

I’ve decided to number the days on the project by the days I have time to work on the project, not actual days since I probably only have time to work on it once, maybe twice a week. 

I have most of the navigation set now – maybe a few tweaks left and some CSS changes, but that’s pretty close to being nailed down.  I have ads in place for the header, right side and under the nav, so we’re good there.   I have the latest story in place, but now I’m working on adding the nice AJAX fade in/fade out that I have on the existing site when someone clicks on the main news story comic cover.  That should go pretty easily and then I’ll clean up the CSS.

The next part of the development will be to add the next 9 news stories to the right of the main story.  Most of that functionality is already done on the existing site, so it shouldn’t be too difficul to port over.

If only I could find the time…