It was a few months ago that me and my buddy Clement came up with the idea of building a site that could list all the local online competitions. He was going to do the design and I was going to do the coding.

Initially I thought that I was going to build the whole thing on WordPress, but after some consideration we decided to build a custom system that would cater specifically to our needs. Lucky for me I had a basic skeleton already (which I customized for ScientificFeed) and the building started.

This is now a fully operational back-end that allows us to upload pictures for the various competitions and also to specify if a competition should be featured at the top of the site or not. It also have a fully integrated mailing list sign up system and messaging system.

In addition to all that I also coded it to export a RSS feed for the site to allow people to follow the site from a reader of their choice.

Check out the WinThis site!

Not only is it jQuery’s birthday (3 years), but they also used the opportunity to release the latest version of their highly acclaimed JavaScript framework.

jQuery definitely changed the way I work, not only allowing me roll out really REALLY awesome work, but also allowing me to do it at lightning speeds.

They added quite a few things to this release, but I’m not going to bore you with the details, if you wanna check out the changelog, you can click here and read all about it.

Along with the release of jQuery 1.3, they also released a new API browser that you can find by clicking here.

I updated this blog’s jQuery now to version 1.3 as well and all seems to be running well.. Awesome!

I like to think of it as a sunrise on a summer morning.. a new design!

There are still one or two things I want to “fix” and change, but for the most part, this is it!

I am not a designer so this took a while to do and I cant even begin to start to say thanks to my buddies (defaulterror, phreek and mocoloco) who helped by making sure I stayed on track.

Just to give some idea on some of the more technical stuff.. scripting is now powered by jQuery and so will the new modal boxes be once I implement them. I also upgraded the WordPress and the blog is now running on the awesome new WordPress 2.7. I also made sure that the pages validate under XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Well that is pretty much all I have to say about the new design..

Hope to see you here again soon!