Tech Note: Reorganizing the Tool Bench

Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 1:15:36 pm PDT

You might have noticed that I’ve gotten rid of those pop-out menus in the left sidebar, and redesigned that section to use the same expandable “accordion” menus as the “LGF Headlines” and “Recent Comments.”

Two benefits to this tweak:

1) It eliminates one jQuery plugin from our lineup of Javascript utilities, resulting in slightly faster load times and slightly less chance of incompatibilities.

2) It makes the user interface more consistent. (Yep, I know there’s still work to be done on that.)

Also, I’ve temporarily removed the tag cloud feature (although a link to the Tag Storm is still in the “Tools/Info” menu) because when we had a surge of traffic recently, the tag cloud code demonstrated that it was in need of optimization (by nearly crashing the MySQL server).