What’s Brett losing sleep over now?

AJAX, that’s what. If you don’t know, you can find out here. I’m waiting for enough wisdom to have compiled itself within the bizarre repository that is the world wide web for a book to be written for designers that can make this stuff really useful. I can do a lot of little cool things, comments that post without reloading the page, logins that log you in as soon as you tab out of the form, etc. I’m even working on a file uploader with a progress bar for a client right now. Frustrating (PHP is missing a key component for making a progress bar happen, so I have to resort to Perl), but interesting. Fortunately, there’s a lot of reference material out there.

Have you ever used a web uploader that didn’t provide any feedback? As my client put it, it’s like being put on hold without music. You don’t even know if the transfer has started, let alone how long it’s going to take. It’s really annoying. I just can’t bring myself to provide an uploader to a client that doesn’t at least let you know that the transfer has successfully started and give you a report at the end. But I digress.

I put together an interesting website this weekend using DOMTab (http://www.naturalcommunitiesmagazine.com) but I’ve already fallen out of love with it. It’s so plain. It had more pop, but they said it was too poppy. So I made it less poppy. And now I need to find another way to work within those constraints. They’re natural, after all, not Amish. Nothing against the Amish. I just don’t get a lot of work from them.