In true Jaron fashion, I spent part of my Memorial Day weekend holiday cleaning, optimizing and fixing various components on my web site.

The biggest change, so far, has been a near-revamp of the News Feeds section. Granted, it doesn’t get much traffic outside of me using it personally, but a few people visit from time to time.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new progress indicator. When you request the news page for the first time, the feeds I’ve designated are checked, downloaded, parsed and then cached. Previously, you’d sit and wait - with no visual feedback of how long it was going to take. Now, you’ll get the indicator, which counts down [or up!] to completion. Much nicer.

Of course, the progress indicator was easy to fashion. What was hard, however, is the “swapping” that takes place from the indeterminate bar to the incrementing bar. With a little bit of CSS trickery it works. I’m sure there are other ways of doing it but, hey, I’m still learning.

With it working for the news feeds, I decided to extend the progress indicator look and feel to the comments. When you submit a comment, you’ll get the lovely indeterminate dialog while my server processes the comment, does a spamment filter, and then finally posts it. Go ahead, try it!

The next change involves the feeds themselves. According to RSS specifications, feed authors can choose to embed an image into the feed that can act as a logo. The feeds list now displays the image - if available - instead of the static text. It’s a nice way to inject some colour into the page, and I’m happy with it. And, if there’s no image, you’ll get the regular headline text. Spiffy.

And, finally, tabs! Rather than building multiple pages to deal with multiple categories, all of the feeds are now contained on one single page. Clicking the tabs merely swaps the contents, and everything is displayed easily, without having to reload or wait for another page to display. And, the code degrades nicely, so if someone with a more deficient browser visits, they’ll just see all of the content - and hopefully get no errors!