I’ve recently updated my new blog’s layout to support mobile phones, iPhone in particular (since that’s what I’m using ;). Here’s how it looks now:
I decided to use the same HTML for both versions, and use CSS media queries to define how the mobile version differs from the main one – I thought this was the cleanest and simplest solution in this case. For more complex sites, it probably makes more sense to have the two versions completely separated.
Surprisingly, it was quite easy to do once I figured out what exactly I needed to do. Turns out, the hardest part is apparently knowing what to put in your header and what media queries to use. Here are some tips and suggestions if you want to make a mobile version of your site too:
I started this blog almost 3 years ago. It was a bit of an experiment, as I wasn’t sure if that actually made sense, if I would want to keep writing it a few months later – so I put it on Jogger (Polish Jabber-based blog service) and I used the classic Kubrick design.
Since I’m rather happy with how this experiment ended up, it was time for a change. The new version is hosted on Linode (definitely the best hosting I have used), and uses a custom-made engine based on Sinatra. Hopefully with this new design I’ll have a bit more motivation to write, because I just couldn’t look at the old one anymore…
If I find some more time, later this year I’m planning to learn some NodeJS and rewrite the engine using it (e.g. with Express).
There’s a few things that I’ve learned while working on the redesign:
I’m working on a new version of this blog, in which I want to use RightJS. This week I wanted to add some kind of pretty Javascript tooltips there; there is a Tooltip class in RightJS, but I don’t like the way these tooltips look. However, I know a jQuery library called “TipTip” which adds very attractive black tooltips. So I took the TipTip code and rewrote it using RightJS (and renamed to RipTip, for obvious reasons) – code is available on GitHub, as usual.
For the last 3 months I’ve been working on a new web application at work. It’s quite unique in some regards, from the architecture perspective; the biggest difference from other projects that I’ve worked on is that almost entire page is one huge embeddable “widget”. This requires a completely different approach than I usually use:
a lot of the code above the model layer is moved to the client side (i.e. Javascript); this means that controllers and helpers are rather simple, controllers mainly return JSON, and there’s quite a lot of Javascript to write
I have to be very careful not to cause any JS, CSS or DOM id conflicts between the embedding site and the “widget“ (which includes such things as keeping all JS code in a single global namespace, and using jQuery in the “noConflict extreme“ mode through an alias)
Another thing, which I’d like to write about today, is the way the views were implemented in this project. Since entire GUI is created dynamically by Javascript, I had basically two options:
render the views in Rails with ERB and send big chunks of HTML via AJAX to Javascript;
or make Rails send only data as JSON, and render the views on the Javascript side.
Apples & Rubies
