Making things pretty

I hired a designer to make some rockin' icons (thanks, Jenna!) for the forthcoming POP Forums v8. It's kind of weird how taking a break from the hardcore coding to make things pretty is a very motivating force. It's like the entire thing becomes more real at that point.

I finally did something a little AJAX-ish with it too. I say "-ish" because I didn't wire in the asynchronous-ness to it just yet. (Making up words is fun!) One of my pet peeves for online forums is all the useless crap that gets mixed in with the actual discussion. Seriously, I don't care what your avatar looks like or when you joined. So in this version, I'm hiding it. Click a name on this page, for example. It's really the only significant UI design decision I've made so far, but you can bet I'm going to refine the crap out of it until it's mostly good. Less is more.

I didn't use the ASP.NET AJAX pieces because I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted, and this process just went much faster. And hey, I'll have a little script library building up too. 

I've also decided to make another performance tweak, and increase/decrease various counts instead of counting rows all of the time. Yeah, I probably should have been doing that six or seven years ago when I first started this forum nonsense. I'll probably go with the good old "freshness date" approach to make sure it hasn't somehow fallen out of sync now and then.

I don't think I'm going to hit the milestone I was hoping to hit by the end of the month. While that does bother me to some degree, I'm not going to let it depress me either.

3 Comments

  • I hope don't take offense, but your UI is pretty depressing. In spite of the AJAX-ness (I can make words up too!), it seemed pretty ordinary. Less-is-more is great, but I think you need some major re-designing to make the forum more appealing...that's my two cents anyway...

    Also, and this is probably due to the fact that your AJAX isn't asynchronous yet, the UI completely stops responding when you click on a name, until the information is retrieved. Pretty annoying.

    I haven't really been following your POP forums project, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious.

  • It is quite asynchronous now, thanks. I don't take offense, because I think you're wrong. There is no reason to make things prettier for the sake of being pretty, especially since it will live in a page template on 99% of the sites that use it.

  • Hi Jeff,

    I guess we must agree to disagree. Was just offering my opinion as an end user.

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