I am very pleased to announced that I just pushed out a long promised update to Jaxs Pro!
It's been a while coming, and there is styill more to come, but this free update brings with it some much requested new features, amongst which are
• Internal, user defined AJAX links within your content
• A full ajax compatible lightbox.

As well many many bug fixes.

A full list of changes and new features can be found here;
http://www.robbie-white.com/design/rapidweaver/jaxspro/changelog.html

Hope you guys like it, lemme know what you think of the update, and I'll get back to trying to stay on top of my life, instead of drowning in it

Robbie

Firstly, let me say it is nice to be back!

As some of you may have noticed, robbie-white.com uptime began to flicker on and off on from sept. 22nd onward, before dying all together for a period of almost a week.

This was due to a massive, and very rare HardDrive failure at my hosts machighway.com
First the main drives failed... at which point they switched over to the back-up drives, which worked for about a day, before failing. They don't appear to have a back-up of the back-up, so everything that was on that server was lost.

When I realized that this problem wasn't going to be fixed all that quicky I decided to move the entire site to a new set of servers, and went about the process of changing DNS etc. and have now begun the lengthy process of getting a ton of content back online!

One of the main casualties of the crash were the support forums. A complete custom install of PunBB, complete with added spam protection and a unique skin... gone.

I was quite proud of the old support forums, they had thousands of members, a brilliant set of users who gave great community spirit, and a catalogie of thousands of answered support questions, as well as customisation tutorials and RapidWeaver debate.

Having said all that, the support forum did have it's problems. By the end PunBB had slowed significantly, weighed down under not only heavy legitimate use, but also a case of the spammers so severe, that to control it I had to install one of the most agressive Akismet anti spam apps availiable. And the anti spam wasn't without it's issues... it would occasionally flag and even ban legitimate users posting legitimate questions with more than two links in them.
I myself was even flagged and band once. (embarrassing)

So, we now have a brand new fully featured support forum!!
The forum is based on the PHPBB system, and is hosted in it's own sub-domain at http://support.robbie-white.com
PHPBB is a swift, slick Bulletin Board system, with built in spam protection, and seemed to perfectly fit my needs for a new support forum!

Users will need to re-register.

As sad as I am to have lost the old forum, I hope that this imporved system will prrove to have the same lively interchange for all its users.

Please register again and send a hello post!

Robbie

So, as has become my tradition I will announce the name of the new theme in advance.... just to get people salivating.

The name of the new theme is Gravity Pro!

Again, the pro name means there is going to be some advanced features that require learning for the average RapidWeaver user... some of them will be familiar to owners of my previous themes, but some will be new even for the most dedicated of my users!

It’s quite a subtle design, modern hopefully, and a little 3d!

Hope you’re all gonna be excited! It’s going to be a good one !

Oh, and for anyone wondering, or wanting to prepare for this theme in advance the PlugIns you’re going to want to familiarize yourself or buy!
• Blocks
• Pluskit
• The Ajax learning center here:

As you will no doubt have noticed, my RapidWeaver site has undergone a complete redesign!
The old site (which used a modified version of Plasma Pro) had begun to bore me, and I wanted a playground for new tricks and cool designs.

The site has been re-coded from the ground up... I have built a completely custom theme for RapidWeaver, a nice clean modern design that I hope puts the emphasis on content.
I'm not gonna lie to you, it took some time I had a lot of content hooked up to the old site, and a lot of legacy code from way back before I even wrote Lava, so unfortunately it wasn;t just a case of css and images, it was a total reworking.

Things to take a peek at: (re things I'm proud of and or would like compliments for!)

I have built a theme browser for the home page, with a cool hover over preview of certain pages. This makes it easy to quickly preview themes without being taken to a new page... you can easily navigate the theme browser using the bar above the content.

All video tutorials are now hosted at viddler, so users can go and download and comment on the videos themselves. This also speeds upload times and reduces my bandwidth issues!

From going live, the forum will begin blending better with the new design, I want to feature avatars more, so that returning members and myself can feel at home!

You're already here, but check out the new blog styling. A little trickery allows me to have a lovely blog date stamp, and the power of css3 in safari and firefox has allowed me to recreate the UI for categories in the browser, which I just love

One of my favorite elements of the new design is the sliding-glass overlay menu in the header, over a speaking block navigation. I love the effect of the lavalamp menu, it was my first theme, and I wanted to throw a little refernce to it into the redesign of my site.
I hope to be making more themes using the menus seemingly limitless potential!
I also worried about the words of the menu. Trying not to sound to pompous and business like, but also not too relaxed and hippy! The descriptions are deliberately casual, and the headings straight forward, a nice quirky edge to them I think!

Some tech-specs:

For web designers and rapidweaver users who care;

The font used for almost all content is Helvetica-Neu-Light (Font weight 400 in CSS terms)
There a fair bit of jQuery magic happening
The PlugIns heavily used in creating the site were Blocks, Stacks, PlusKit and most importantly the styled text page! (which is still my favorite RapidWeaver page type)
This site will be mostly tested in FireFox and Safari. Having looked at my user stats on google analytics it would be stupid to waste too much time on checking in anything else... although, and here is a big one, I am officially dropping support for IE6 on my personal site only!
Frankly, its time that browser dies completely, so IE6 users will be redirect to a page, clearly stating that whilst all of my themes support the browser, my personal site does not, and they should update to IE 7+, Safari, Firefox or Chrome!
The site will be checked in all other browsers of course, but that one has to go!

Also, because of the fact that I am mostly working in two pretty advanced browsers, I will be making full use of their advanced support for CSS3, specifically their support for rounding corners thru CSS properties... You'll see that a lot on the site in safari and firefox, I must say, it is an absolute pleasure to develop solely for standards compliant advanced browsers for once!

Tags: JQuery | This Site | Design | Viddler

With this new improved homepage design I am killing IE6 support for my personal site only, users will be redirected to a simple page saying IE6 is no longer supported, but giving them links to the preview sites of my themes, all of which are pixel perfect in IE.

And believe me... it feels good!

The reasons I have for doing this are three fold:

• Most (re:98%) are using Safari or Firefox on a Mac...
• Getting such a complex beautiful site to work in IE would add about 70% more development time to the site because it is hell to code for
(Those two together for a pretty simple, logical and mathematical way of looking at the problem that I couldn’t ignore)
• It is time for it to die so that web development can move on!

IE Has been holding web developers back for years... be it in terms of productivity, where checking and correcting for IE6 can sometimes be double the work creating the project was, or in terms of creativity where designers and coders are forced to use simpler effects, scripts or applications, because IE6 just can;t handle the bleeding edge technologies anymore.

We are seeing an influx of larger companies dropping IE6 support. Digg is dropping it, although only for logged in users, but it’s a start...
http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

Google will drop it soon for youtube

This is great news.

http://www.37signals.com/ dropped IE6 support along time ago, saying that it was constraining what they could do, and it had to go.
Quite right I say.

ALL THAT SAID;
I recognize the importance of IE 6 support to the users of all my themes, so all themes still support and are checked in IE6, and future themes will be as well, at least for the near future.

I hate IE6 with a passion that almost defies the kind of words it is appropriate to type on a semi-proffesional blog.

It was a complete pleasure coding this site just for Safari & Firefox in RapidWeaver... A complete Please

Robbie