Well I spent this afternoon making some more updates to my business website. I incorporated a few more images and rearranged the order of the images on the thumb bar at the bottom of the page.

I also added arrow buttons to allow the user to manually rotate through the thumbs, and also set the thumb bar to auto-rotate if the image currently displayed by the slideshow doesn't appear on the thumb bar.

One invisible but important change was to set up timely preloading of the images such that there shouldn't be a big wait for individual images to load, but also no big wait up front. Basically the page now loads an image, and schedules the preload of the next image a few seconds later, long before the slideshow will automatically display it. In this way, the next image is loading while the user is viewing the current image, and should avoid delays.

If the user dorks with the thumb-bar the preloads and slideshow are cancelled and rescheduled to be further out. Theoretically this should prevent the user from being interrupted while working the toolbar with annoying delays or images loading.

Minor thing I discovered this morning while testing a page in FireFox.  FireFox v1.5.0.6 does not support or recognize the <code> tag that people occasionally use to show an excerpt of source code...   more »

I'm experimenting with floating sidebars in blog articles.  If it works out okay and is legible in your browser let me know...   more »

You may have noticed that my blog had stopped correcting comment subjects for awhile.  Or rather it was only sporadically doing it.  (I like to keep the subject on the replies nice and short because it looks neater in the recent comments sidebar.)  So you should never see "Re: Re: Re: Do NOT Click That Link -- Another E-Mail Scam" as a comment title when the form first comes up.  Instead it should be something more like "Re: Do NOT Click That Link ...".  Due to a change in the way BlogHarbor processes comments, the script I wrote to do this was only working some of the time.  Tonight I made a fix (with help from BlogHarbor support--thanks John!) which should correct the issue.  Please let me know if it doesn't work for you.

Thanks!

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I have now redesigned the ULev photo albums to use rolling divisions to display photo thumbnails, doing away with the fixed number of columns on those pages.  Let me know what you think!  (Remember you can navigate among the photo albums by using the TOPICS navigation links in the sidebar.)

Recent photos component added to sidebar. It uses rolling divisions to display the photo thumbnails, which look good in IE and -okay- in mozillla... (mozilla and similar browsers seem to ignore the vertical-align style on the span, so photos with long titles don't line up nicely... I may deal with this by dropping the titles from the recent photos sidebar.)...   more »

Doubtless ULev's sister blog will be of little or no interest to most of my readers.  But just in case, here it is: http://stonerainproject.blogharbor.com/blog.  Check it out, I'm happy with how the rolling divisions made the card galleries look.