Blog Design Change #2: Programmatic Approach

I was updating my blog design in these past 7 days. It was more of functionality upgrade by programmatic approach rather than fine tuning the css and html code. I use jQuery to further leverage functionality and the look of my free blogger account. jQuery is a Javascript API (for a non-geek, you can call it some kind of a feature upgrade to the web pages) that lets you get fantastic result by writing only a small piece of javascript code. There are many sites that is using jQuery, to name some of the popular ones are Google and Facebook.

Last weekend I have my hands on that jQuery things that people are talking and use so much for the past years. And the result is MARVELOUS! This is the list that I have done for the past 3 days:

• Added [Drag To Share] plugin so that you can drag on an image or post title to share it on social networking sites like facebook, twitter, tumblr, digg, delicious etc. To try it, you can drag and drop the title of this post (click the title and hold the click while you move your mouse pointer). This feature is a little bit buggy especially when you right-click the image two times. I use tutorial from searching Google and adjusted several part of the code to suite my needs. In the coming weeks, I will post a guide article on how to do this in your blogger account. For those of you that aren't patient enough can go search in Google using keyword: "Drag To Share in Blogger". I think that this technique to share articles or posts is relatively new and will become more popular in the coming months.
• Added [Photo Tagging] plugin so that you can view the tag of certain area on the photo and see a description of it. You can use it pretty much the same like Photo Tagging feature in Facebook. This feature is also a little bit buggy, especially if you are using Internet Explorer (tested with IE8). I use ImgNotes v0.2 to include this feature in my site with a little customization. ImgNotes is a jQuery plugin. As I learn jQuery, I also created a little utility to tag the photo (that will generate javascript codes containing coordinates of the tags in the photo), which I have finished but has not been uploaded yet. Please be patient while I'm working on the How To Include Photo Tagging In Blogger guide article. I'll work on it around this weekend.
• Added Google Analytics and Hit Counter (from StatCounter). I use this to analyze visitors of my site.
• Hosting several image, css and javascript files in MyDataNest.com. They are a file sharing service that has a direct linking capabilities, making it suitable to store your files and design resources. You can open a free account with 10GB bandwidth quota and 2GB free space. I don't think that the speed of MyDataNest free account is good enough, but that's the best you can get for free. I hope someday Google will allow people to direct linking to their file sharing services.

With Blogger and MyDataNest account combined with one nicely designed template and don't forget jQuery, you can create a great looking website without spending dollars on good (fast, reliable, full featured) web hosting services such as GoDaddy or the likes of it. You can do it all for FREE!! If you are planning to use your own domain name such as www.aristian.com instead of aristian.blogspot.com, then all you have to pay is $10 for 1 year subscription. Pity on me that www.aristian.com has already been taken by a domain-name-junkie that listed it for $1500.

So, my next todo list is:

• Further fine tuning on several parts of my blog design using jQuery and maybe customize the styling of Drag To Share plugin a little bit.
• Create an article on how to include photo tagging capabilities in blogger and upload the photo tagging utility.
• Finding the identity and name of my blog. This is important! Once I solve this matter, it would ease me to modify the header section of this site and decide what domain name to buy.

That list is going to take some time to finish it. This is Aristian speaking, over and out!