The new design uses some of the techniques that I learnt in in Mark Boulton’s book, A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web.

In this book it goes over how to use colour, typography and grid systems to create a more visually engaging design. I applied some of these techniques to the old layout and gave it a bit of a refresh.

Take a look at some of the before and after screenshots that I’ve made. Click on the screenshots to get the full size version:

Homepage

Project Page

PHP Lastfm API Page

jQuery Plugins Page

jQuery Slideshow Page

About Page

What I’ve started doing is creating a sort of web design scrapbook. After I buy a new issue of the magazine I’ll go through the old one and cut out any intesting articles. These are then kept in a folder while the rest is recycled.

So far I’ve got loads of useful information including:

• Future web trends feature
• A great article on nanopayments and how to make them work
• How to get your first job in web design (will be useful in the future maybe?)
• An article on CSS3 and HTML5 techniques
• CSS sprite images tutorial
• Cufón tutorial (custom fonts)
• And a six part tutorial on the basics of going freelance (so far it’s up to part five so still one more to go)

It’s a great magazine and if you can you should pick up a copy. In places other than the UK it’s known as Practical Web Design (I’m getting Microsoft had a bit of a hissy fit at them at some point).

There was also something added behind the scenes: Usage logging. I did this basically to gain an understanding of how many people were using the Downloader as well as what campaigns they were activating and deactivating.

Whenever someone activates or deactivates a campaign it will tell me what campaign it was that was affected. This allowed me to build up a usage graph for each campaign. You can view the stats online yourself if you wish, however the interface isn’t brilliant. It’s just something simple that I threw together.

At the time of writing Ancestral Tales is by far the most popular campaign with 89 activations and 47 deactivations. Roughly speaking that means that about 42 people have that campaign activated, however this number might not be reliable.

You can can’t do the same thing for the other campaigns are they were available before the activation logs started, therefore it’s possible that people will have those campaign activated and they won’t show up in the logs.

If I notice any other interesting trends in the stats I’ll post it here.

Note: All that I log is when the action was taken and what the action is. Nothing sinister

I say I made the changes but that’s actually a complete lie. Meinhard was the one who made the actual change to the plugin and then email it along to me. Luckily for you lot he’s agreed to let me post it up as a new version.

The feature that was added was one which allows you to choose how long the fade lasts when it changes images. This allows for longer fades which makes the slideshow feel “softer” and calmer. If you want to see an example of how the longer fade makes the slideshow look take a look at this website. That is Meinhard’s website and the images are on a 2 second fade.

As I was releasing a new version anyway I decided to tidy up the script a little bit as well. It is now able to be packed which means that I could include a minified version of the script with the package. This takes the filesize down from 2.43KB to just 1.55KB (or 1.41KB if you remove the credits from the minified version). It doesn’t sound a lot but it’s lost over a third of the filesize using Dean Edwards’ Packer (I also tried JSmin but it didn’t compress it quite as well as the packer).

Overall it’s a good release and worth upgrading to if you’re already using the plugin. It’s also a drop in replacement as only the plugin file itself has changed and upgrading to 1.3 doesn’t change anything unless you start using the new fadetime option.

You can download the new version from the project website.

Enjoy the release!

The plugin itself is number 23 on the list, however there is also jQuery Cycle on the list at 17 which is based off my plugin with a few extra features.

I’m not in the mood to write a long block of text, so here’s a list

• Camping isn’t fun when it’s really cold or really hot
• Camping is amazing at all other times
• Paris is an amazing city
• The Paris metro system is dead easy to use
• The Eiffel Tower is really tall and scary (I hate heights)
• London is also amazing
• The London Underground is so much more confusing than the Paris metro
• £7 to get from London to Crewe is cheap
• Getting home to a car that won’t start is annoying
• Fixing a car is stressful but it’s nice when it’s going

Starting tomorrow I’m officially on holiday. I’m going to be relaxing and not doing any work at all for a whole two weeks. I’m first going to France to a camp site on the coast. I’m then traveling from there with my girlfriend to Paris for a few night and then onto London for a few more. It should be a great holiday!

I’m not taking my laptop so I won’t be able to answer any email or questions for the next two weeks. I might pop onto a computer at an internet cafe for half an hour, however don’t count on me getting back to you until August 6th.

Enjoy the summer everyone!!!

Better Downloading

Before the application would only check to see if the cache directory existed before it assumed that all the mods files had been downloaded. This was easy to code but could have lead to quite a few errors. I hadn’t had any reports of it causing problems yet, but I thought it was better to fix it rather than let it happen.

The new method is to check to see if each file exists before it says that it has been downloaded correctly.

Error Checking

I had a few people report that the application was stalling at the Working… screen. This is now partially fixed by detecting if there is an error and then giving some suggestions of how to get around the error. Normally this is to do with file permissions on Windows and can be fixed by running the application with administrator privileges.

Multi Part Campaigns

A campaign was released that had multiple parts. This is now supported by displaying a set of links to the right of the campaign description which allows you to change between different parts of a campaign.

This new campaign is only available on version 1.2 of the downloader and above. If you want to see it you need to update to the latest version.

To update to the latest version you should downloaded the air file or press the Check for updates button in the settings panel of the application.

Any comments are welcome

This has now been fixed and I apologise to anyone who attempted to get a copy during this time.

The same thing happened again. I decided this time that it wasn’t WMP’s fault and went to look at some of the tracks. When you tried to change any of the metadata Windows gave an unexpected error and told me the files data was wrong. However the file still played fine.

The only think left to do was to concede that my backup was infact corrupt. This left me loosing about 700 mp3’s from my collection. Thankfully I buy CD’s so a new copy is only a quick rip away, however it’s still a pain to have to do it. In the mean time I always have Spotify!

The moral of the story? Always check your backup is alright before you format the original. In this case it’s not a disaster; just a bit of a pain!