Tech Note: Moving the Deck Chairs on the Spaceship

Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 6:30:20 pm PDT

I’ve been using that Flippy Triangle technique to organize more of the stuff that used to be visible by default in our left sidebar, like the Statistics, the Tag Cloud, and the contact form. This user interface saves a lot of space; in fact, the sidebar looks almost naked with everything tucked away.

I didn’t do this just for the cleaner look, though; the statistics display now refreshes via Ajax every time you show that flippy menu item. Ajax is also used to dynamically refresh the LGF Headlines, Top 10 Comments, and Recent Comments sections in the same way. And the contact form uses an Ajax token-based technique that prevents it from being abused by mindless spambots, so I don’t get hundreds of contact emails with links to poker sites and weird German porn.