chrismacpherson.com

September 07 2010

I am just starting to build this blog and thought I’d create some early content and describe what my ideas are as I go along. Don’t expect riveting dialogue, my powers of description are weak, like my knitting skills.

I have been messing with HTML and JavaScript since around 1997 and have always played with ideas and built half finished websites that did more than just displaying a page at a time. I liked pre-loading content and finding interesting ways of allowing the user to access it. Switching things on or off, sliding things in or out of the screen, it was a challenge getting it to work properly but now things are much easier with tools like JQuery and Prototype to name just a few.

With the availability of cross-browser aware tools I feel a lot more creative knowing that I wont spend 10 times longer making sure things work in all (hmmm...) browsers than it took to create the idea in the first place. So I decided to try and create something that was a bit more interesting than just a nice layout. It’s quite possible it wont work and may cause damage to your eyes but hopefully I’ll be able to create a design that is standards compliant and safe to view.

I will be using Expression Engine to power all my backend so I’ll be pulling all my data from there. I’m pretty new to EE so it’s going to be interesting working out the best structure for organising my data too. There seems to be a good community for this product, and I’ve built a few modules and plugins for it already at work, but I haven’t actually built a site with it before so

My first idea is very basic with a simple unordered list menu styled in-line with CSS, and a <div> acting as a container for a page of content. The aim is for this <div> to slide off the page and the new requested page to slide in replacing the old one. The new page will also use a GET request through an AJAX call to get it’s contents without reloading the whole page giving me a nice feeling of continuity through each user request. 

So hopefully if you’re reading this then that is what you are seeing

More in the next bit…