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New Design! Engine Changes!

There’s a new layout that’s been pushed up.

I think it looks much better and it will include search tips and some words about the purpose of this website.

I’ve been working on this design for a while. It’s definitely been fun, though I have to tell you that sometimes it can be pretty hard to get everything just exactly as you want it. I know my CSS pretty well, but I not the super expert that might be required to solve the minor issues that I couldn’t get to work exactly perfectly. And wouldn’t you know it, but the problems were both non-compliance by IE. When are they going to follow the standards?

Why do they get away with this?

I hope you enjoy the new design. I know I do. I think it looks much better than the almost ugly old version.

Also, I changed the way the searching works. Before, the AJAX call was grabbing the results from a PHP page that would first go and count the number of records that were possible to be returned, and then it would hit the database again to get the actual records that were going to be returned to the front end. So, two queries that weren’t running asynchronous. Now they are two different AJAX calls and it runs faster. I find it interesting that sometimes the count query doesn’t beat the record set results query, and as a result the notation of how many pages could possibly be returned isn’t listed. But usually it is. There's something really interesting to me about the fact that sometimes it doesn’t return first and sometimes it does. I like slight randomness in programming. Alot.

Also, I built the ability to page through the record results. So, instead of just knowing that you’re not seeing all the results for a particular query, now you can actually flip through the pages, if you wanted. I’m curious to see how many people actually will do that.

You did know that I store the queries that people search on? I don’t recall if I posted that before. I haven’t had a chance to look at that data yet. But I’m excited to look at it and see where and what folks are searching on.

Below find the first version of BayAreaSoldHomes. Stored here for posterity’s sake.

Version 1 of BayAreaSoldHomes

Wow. That image sure looks crappy.

Here's the image if you want to look at the full sized one.

http://www.BayAreaSoldHomes.com/images/version1.gif 

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