After many an hour and not to mention a few skipped heart beats after some upgrading went wrong, I am proud to re-launch www.saj-online.com.

The new look was inspired by the full overhaul of the back end of this entire blog. Since I was upgrading all of the modules that drive this site I decided to give it a Web 2.0 look and introduce a few cool things to enhance the end user’s experience and off course to make everything more "pretty".

Other than the brand new graphical layout here are a few of the visible changes:

– Greetbox: Browser detects where the user is coming from and greets them with a custom message and offer the option to subscribe to my RSS feed.

– More Browser Friendly: Tested over and over again and tweaked coding to ensure maximum cross browser compatibility.

– Gravatars: This allows the users to have their custom Avatar or Icon whenever they post a comment.

– Lightbox: Provides a smooth java popup that dims the webpage and brings focus to the image that is clicked ok. Click the image below for a demo.

– Tag Cumulus Cloud: A visually stimulating flash based tag cloud that allows users to click on a keyword and see all posts related to that topic. The cloud rotates on the page according to mouse movements.

[WP-CUMULUS]

Other than that all the other upgrades were done in the back end to improve overall functionality and add more features to give the end user a stimulating experience. The whole process was a good learning curve for me. I learnt 3 valuable lessons:

1. Backup, backup, backup! If it weren’t for this step, I would’ve lost over 3 years of blogs and I would’ve probably thrown the towel in and stopped blogging if I wasn’t able to bring the back end back to life…

2. f you’re trying to troubleshoot something, it’s sometimes better to step away from the problem at hand to clear your mind rather than banging your head against the wall trying the same thing over and over again. After spending nearly 2 days straight trying to recover from the disaster of an upgrade I left it alone, went to bed… and when I got up in the morning, tried a totally different plan of attack and viola… we were back online…

3. Google is your friend. I can’t believe how many times my little friend, all knowing and infinitely wise has pulled me out of a tight situation or has shone that little ray of light on the solution that I’ve been after.

With that I bid you all farewell for now, I hope that you like the new site and would love to hear your comments!