Over the years, I have saved many of the emails we receive through the contact forms on our various Web sites. In addition to our main Logical Expressions site, all of our article sites (The Publishize Newsletter, Computor Companion magazine, Logical Tips, Pet Tails etc., have comment forms that appear on the article pages.
I receive contact form emails from at least one of our sites almost every day. Most of them are from happy people who have solved a problem thanks to one of our articles.
If there's such a thing as karma, we have points beyond belief. I get complimentary emails like this one, for example:
"This instruction page was great! I was up and running in no time and my index works! Thanks!"
or, really happy ones like:
"Oh. My. Freaking. God. Thank you so much! I really appreciate this article!"
or
"Thank you so much for this article! I really cannot thank you enough; you saved a breakdown and possibly a computer-related violent act!"
Thanks to some magical programming by James, I finally now have all 440 of these testimonials rotating on the Logical Expressions site on the left-hand side below the menu. I've wanted to put them up for years, but it's always been a low-priority project, mostly because compiling them from email is sort of a pain. But I finally got fired up and did it. (Realistically, reading how much people love your writing isn't much of a hardship. I shouldn't have put it off for so long!)
In any case, now every time you go to another page of the site, or refresh a page, a new testimonial appears.
How it Works
For those who wonder how this works, here's the simple explanation. James uses some programming code to access a file on our site where the testimonials are stored. An individual testimonial is displayed randomly on each page of the site.
The more nerdy explanation is:
I entered all 440 testimonials into an XML file. Each line has two attributes, one for the testimonial text itself, another for the attribution.
James wrote a bit of Javascript code, which has functions that select and display a random testimonial retrieved from the XML file. Because our site is set up using includes, we added a small <div> for the testimonial section in our left-side include, so it appears on every page of the Web site.
The Javascript invokes a function called getTestimonial, which retrieves a random testimonial from the XML file. The page must have a Testimonial div defined somewhere (in this case in our the spot we set up on the left side). Then it assembles a testimonial from the XML and inserts it into the specified page element. James added numbering, so that when you view the site, you can see which number testimonial you are looking at out of the 440 stored in the XML file.
We also updated the Web site style sheet with some new styles to format the testimonials. Because we set up the testimonial attribution as a separate XML attribute, we were able to use a span tag to format it separately.
Because our breadcrumb navigation uses a similar technique to access another XML file, James actually pulled out all the script tags from the site and stored them in a separate file, which is also part of an include. That way if we add more scripting later, we just need to update that external file.
I'm sure at some point, James will write an article on Nerdy Musings that explains in excruciatingly geeky detail how he created the rotator and the XML Breadcrumbing we use on the LE site. But until then, that's as nerdy as I can get.
Less Nerdy Improvements
In much less nerdy news, I also swapped in a new photograph of us that appears on the right-hand side of the site. We took the original photo in the middle of winter using a camera timer. We stood in front of a snow berm (so the background would be easy to drop out in Photoshop), but we were FREEZING. Thus, our faces may have looked a little...tense.
The new photo is one of the ones taken during the Redbook photo shoot by Erika Larsen. It was a beautiful day and we look way, way happier.
I also added a few photos from the shoot to the About Us page. I finally, finally got to use the caption: James Byrd and Susan Daffron: Out Standing in Their Field.
Sometimes it's the little things ;-)