zerolight

Over the past week I’ve been tinkering with my site quite a bit, discovering cool new components such as slimbox, and simple image rotator. I’ve done a lot of editing of my Joomla template to freshen up the site a bit. It uses the same basic rockettheme “Mobius” template that it’s used for some time, but I’ve replaced most of the graphics as well as adding the rotating banner (simple image rotator) in order to give it a more modern – gadgety look.

Part of the new look incorporates Simple Image Rotator. This clever, lightweight component uses mootools to add that rotating image banner at the top of my site. I’ve thrown up a few images based on gadgets and things I’m interested in, which seems appropriate.

The other less obvious change is a lightbox clone called slimbox. This has some nice additional functionality, yet uses a a much lighter framework than lightbox, and doesn’t require all images on a page to have loaded before its functionality is enabled. It also doesn’t get confused when you have embedded objects on your page. Once installed, it works exactly the same as lightbox, except that you can optionally add an extra group name to the rel tag which allows navigation from popped up image to popped up image. Check out the Impreza/Evo story or my new flickr photostream (above) to see what I mean. All in all, it’s faster, slicker, and smaller than lightbox. And it works better.