When listening to Boagworld's podcast some weeks ago I heard about the Fancy Form Design book from SitePoint. Since Paul Boag recommended it I thought, well, give it a try. And yes, I think it's a nice book, indeed. I like it because it gives the reader new ideas on how to design and implement modern forms.

So being inspired after reading the book I looked at my own "Your comment" form and thought: "OMG! WTF?" I have to admit I never really spent much time on designing and implementing the form. But after reading the book I though it was about time to give my comment form a little bit of love. During the process of revamping the form I also digged deeper into the world of jQuery which is a good thing imho. I even wrote my first little plugin that handles an example value on form fields like this:

$("#id_author").fancyField({sampleValue: "Joe Cool"});

It will automatically setup everything like registering for focus() and blur() and even registering on the enclosing form tag for the submit event. Anyway, have a look at the form for yourself to get the idea :)

Several months ago I blogged about a reworked design of my blog. Today finally I managed it to put it online. Since I've been very busy because of a big project at work I didn't find much time to work on the redesign.

Anyway, now that the design is online I can focus on new features again. There are a lot of things I want to add: Twitter integration, Gravatar support, Solr, markitup and so on. Maybe I should take a closer look at tools like Things or The Hit List - hehehe :-)

Though I was quite confident with my newest design there's always room for improvement. So I sat down once more, started my GFX app and played around. The new design tries to visually divide the areas on my page a bit more, like the side panel for the tag cloud. Though I think there's still more room for refinements left it's still worth to implement the revamped design. I mean, at the end of the day there will be always things to work on. That's the very nature of software, isn't it?

Work on my page is still going on. Will it ever end? Most probably not. There are always lots of ideas floating around in my head. If I only had the time to transform them into reality :-)

Currently my site uses a mix of english and german words. For example the top level navigation uses English. But the blog navigation on the other hand uses German which is not so cool for non-German readers. Fortunately django comes to my help with its internationalization (i18n) support. So expect to see a localization update soon :-)