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Site updates (v5.5)

Article published on:24 July 2007, 11:13

Yesterday we updated the site.

For this site update we made the following changes:

  • Interface updated: more eye candy. It's not a new interface, we like to say it's just better made, smoother, looking much better than the previous interface. With this update we made sure the interface still fits on 800x600 resolutions, and we made several design corrections. The gallery and the blog pages should be much better now.
  • The interface now uses more CSS 3 selectors and properties. Try viewing the site with Safari - one of the web browsers which implement text-shadow and box-shadow.
  • Handheld and print stylesheets. These are new interface templates.
  • The handheld interface is for cell phones, smart phones and anything else connected to the Internet. The site now looks very pleasant on any mobile device. We recommend you to try Opera Mini and/or Opera Mobile.
  • The print stylesheet is used whenever you want to print any page from this we site. For this interface we eliminated the navigation menus, leaving just the content, with no fancy graphics.
  • New feature: Universal Search. All the search fields in the site provide the following capabilities:
    • You can type "/path/to/the/page/you/want" (for example /mihai/blog). This allows you to quickly and intuitively jump to any web page you want. Do you want to contact me? Just type /mihai/contact and submit.
    • Automatic input completion: you do not need to remember page paths. You will automatically see the available pages everywhere you want. We like Web Forms 2 and for this reason I implemented in JavaScript support for <datalist>. This an implementation which works with any input form, with any external XML document. The implementation makes use of XmlHttpRequest (aka AJAX).
    • automatic input completion also works with page titles. If you want to see the images Marius made, just type "images".
    • Site search, just type any keywords you want and submit. The keywords you type will be searched in page titles and page contents.
    • Google Custom Search Engine. You can search our web site with Google as well. Using any search field in our site, you just have to type "g your keywords" (prefix the list of keywords you want with "g ").
    • Additionally, if you want to go to another external web site, just type www.ubuntu.com (or whatever address you want).
    All of this functionality works even if you have JavaScript disabled. Automatic completion works in web browsers which implement Web Forms 2. Currently Opera 9 implements Web Forms 2, however ... due to a bug Opera cannot load the external XML file.
  • Breadcrumb navigation everywhere in the web site. Move the mouse over the title below the logo to see the breadcrumb navigation links.
  • A new search field everywhere in the site. When you view the breadcrumb navigation you can click the search icon on left to activate the Universal Search field.
  • Several improvements to the Content Management System. In comparison with the initial site release, the CMS now has lots of improvements in the file manager, the Awebitor (my HTML editor). Also, the latest ReTidy script is now included everywhere in the CMS. The generated code is a lot cleaner.
  • We've updated several pages and made corrections. One of the pages we updated is the Site timeline.
  • Many improvements to the code output. I made sure the code has new lines where needed, making it easy to read. I like clean, readable markup. :)

These changes were made in preparation for two national Romanian contests of informatics: see InfoEducatie and ProInfo.

Published in: maintenance.