New news highlight boxes on Culinate

From On Culinate by James Berry

March 25, 2009

Or actually, not so new. It’s just that I’ve been too busy to blog about them, you see. I wrote earlier about our new design for showing off our highlighted stories, blog posts, etc., but noted at that time that they didn’t yet auto roll. I fixed that a few weeks ago: you’ll see that the boxes at the bottom of the home page (they also appear in the left or right column on various interior pages) now periodically auto-roll to the next story.

This auto-rolling has several purposes, but primarily it means that somebody just looking at the page for a while will be exposed to all the items, not just the one we happened to show first. If you’re a hasty reader, or just want to skim quickly through the items, you can run your mouse over them to select each item individually…and the item you’re looking at won’t roll out from under you until you move the mouse aside. Oh, and we pick the starting at random, so people viewing the page at different times will see a different initial item (though our fragment caching may mean that if you return to the page at several times relatively quickly you’ll see the same initial item).

One thing we’ve tried to do on Culinate is to look better on more advanced browsers while also working (where possible) on older browsers. This feature is a good example of that. While it works back to IE6, we do something really neat if you have either the Safari or Chrome browser, both of which are based on the leading-edge WebKit engine: we use a CSS transition to fade between the images. This looks really cool, and makes it a pleasing transition as well.

Thanks for noticing... ;)