Well, after a long absence of new posts, I'm back. First things first, some administrative issues: I'm changing the tone and format of the site. I noticed after my first two posts I was spending too much time writing up blog content, when the main focus of the site was supposed to be adding new features and apps for peoples to play around with. So, I'm shifting my focus to that, and changing the tone of my blog posts from objective detail-oriented tutorials to subjective anecdotes and opinions, with some brief updates on what I've been doing on the site and a focus on new features that I think are cool or am proud of. So, I'm sorry plethora of internet traffic who was looking for the other 3 parts of my 4 part database series, but that just ain't going to happen anymore. But the good part is that I imagine casual Justin is more fun to read than formal Justin, anyways (plus, it's more fun for Justin to write as casual Justin...I'll stop now).

Anyways, enough of that stuff. I love the Ajax Control Toolkit! I know, I'm probably preaching to the choir, but that's ok. I've had experience with the basic Ajax Controls, of course. The UpdatePanel and Timer were put to good use in my Ajax Chat Program. True, it definitely needs some work, and it will get some in the near future, but for what it is now, the Ajax controls worked great.

The toolkit though, was a huge help in my Document Constructor, the HTMLEditor specfically. My Document Constructor is a web-based Word Processor (think Google Docs, but not as awesome). Initally, I had planned to code the whole thing myself, which would include not only the ability to type and save stuff, but also to change the font, the font size, make text bold, and so on. I started with a ComboBox for changing font size, which worked pretty well. So that was one feature down, 47 to go. Then, my brain turned on: hey, there's this HTMLEditor control over here that I thought I'd heard of, that has like all of these features in it already. Sure enough, I added it to my page and got myself a nice Document editor. I added the creating, deleting, saving (and eventually printing [hopefully]) functionality; the actual text-editing is all that HTMLEditor. Mmmm, Ajax Control Toolkit :drools:

Speaking of that Document Constructor, as I was finishing the final touches to make it functional, I realized that all of the apps on my site required registration! With the point of this site being to let people play around with my app functionality, I figured the registration hassle was being a roadblock to that (Though my registration isn't a hassle, of course! Only four fields, and no email confirmation [yet], woohoo!). Anyways, I made it so that if you aren't registered/logged in, you can still play with some documents as an anonymous user. You can create/edit/and even delete documents, but all anonymous users share those documents, so anyone can do anything to them. Log in if you want a tamper-free doc.

Last topic of the day: jQuery. I've been playing around with some jQuery on my site, and I've been pleased with it, and ready to use more. The log-in box on this site is displayed using jQuery, and of course the New Apps news slider on my main page is as well (thanks to Queness for the tutorial on the subject). One of my next projects I plan on undertaking will have to do with jQuery; I want to create an image gallery using either Litebox or Carousel (or both). Oh, and I need to create a blog authoring page so I can stop writing these posts in HTML! Mmmm, HTMLEditor, :drools: