A few changes to mention here. I just typed up a nice entry but my session expired and I lost the entry! Hard to believe I was typing that for over 30 minutes. I'm reminded of the saying about blogs "Never have so many written so much to be read by so few".
Number one improvement is the lightbox. Screen-shots and images now display much more cleanly, the transition is smoother, it's easy to navigate from one picture to another, and there's an integrated slideshow! This was one of the areas of the site I really wanted to improve and I finally can say I'm satisfied with it. Another noticeable improvement is the expand / collapse button on the expanding sections.
I was using the old one as a toggle, but now there are separate ones for expand and collapse. The look fits in a lot better with the overall look of the site, too. I'm also planning on sprinkling some of these buttons around the site and displaying a bit of info in a tooltip where applicable. Should look nice when it's done.
Okay, now for the cool projects. Through work I've been doing a lot of map development, and it's been really fun to work on a technology that is really starting to come into its own. Google's API gives developers a ton of flexibility and power, so the sky's the limit when it comes to mapping applications. The first app I wrote was a virtual tour of State College. Now that the weather's bad and State College is uniformly gray I won't be able to add any new locations to it, but once May rolls around there will be some new POIs to check out. Just today I finished a site-wide mapping system that provides maps, directions and printing functionality. Check them out at http://www.statecollege.com. I'd like to leverage this technology to write something that my friends and I can use - integrate mapping and social networking (buzzword alert). Some cool functionality might be to enable people to plan trips with their friends, plan parties and events that people can attend with integrated directions, or let their friends know where they'll be for holiday break. I don't know, still pretty vague.
Lastly, Rails! I'm really excited about Rails. It's an open source web app framework written in Ruby. It uses the Model-View-Controller pattern, which is really well suited to developing web apps, and it has a couple cool maxims that it enforces ("Convention over Configuration" and "Don't Repeat Yourself"). Both of these help developers write clean, loosely coupled code that is very maintainable. Rails also gets you up and running pretty quickly. As a PHP programmer it's a real nice change to work in Ruby and I'd like to eventually write a couple sites using it, but so far all I've made is a pretty lousy phonebook. Wikipedia has a decent article about Rails if you want to read more.
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