It's been 16 months since we've changed the design of the pixyblog.com, so it's about time for an update. Today sees a new front page and other smaller updates on sub-pages. The main difference you'll see is the slideshow of the latest photos. For this we're using the Galleryview slideshow script by Jack Anderson.
The slideshow is a jQuery plugin; which means it's dependant on the jQuery javascript framework. Our decision to use this framework marks a change from what we were using; the Prototype framework. In the past year or so jQuery has become more active and there are many more plugins now available which suit our needs. So we will be gradually moving all the PixyBlog themes to use jQuery instead.
The Galleryview plugin appears to be out-of-development, but it's a great plugin and we plan to expand it's features so that it can be easily integrated into our different themes. More on this to follow.
jQuery is great. It's simple, powerful and widely supported amongst all those different web browser out-there. It also has a ton of plugins that you can use straight away. As I mentioned we are moving to jQuery across all our sites and all our themes. Sven's already moved his theme to use jQuery (with a little help).
We tweeted a while ago about trialling some advertising across our blogs, and this is now part of our front page. Our advertisers are carefully choosen, so you won't be seeing any ads for online casinos, visa for the US or the likes. There will be a separate news article soon about advertising options and also one of our advertisers; Naturpixel.
More photos, bigger photos. We've tried to use the front page space to increase both the size and number of photos from our bloggers. We're not quite finished yet, but we liked the changes thus far so much we decided to go-live with what we've got. Over the next couple of weeks we will be tweaking the pixyblog.com site (and sub-sites) to speed-up the loading time and also try and squeeze-in some more photos and dynamic features.
We've tested the site on most of the latest browser (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome), but please let-us-know if you're seeing some display issues. Also, we've updated our style sheets so before you do report a bug, try refreshing your browser a few times to see if you've got a cached version of any of these.
Finally, any thoughts or feedback very welcome!
- Pixy Team
Just a quick follow-up post to our PixyBlog badge for your other websites; one of our team has just come across a javascript DHTML version of the Flickr badge which would also work for PixyBlog. Here's a link to the article by Joe Tan, and below is a example of the badge from our demo website:
Do you have another website or blog as well as your PixyBlog? Would you like an easy way to display your latest photographs on another site? You can now with our new PixyBlog Badge.
Our badge is a simple include that you can copy-and-paste into the pages of your other sites. You can change the number, size and orientation of the photographs displayed. You can even display photographs from a specific Gallery or Tag. All this is easily configurable from your PixyBlog admin interface; just login and go to "Settings > Badge" to customize your own.
Below is a sample badge showing the 6 latest photos horizontal on the demo.pixyblog.com site.
