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An AJAX enhancement for WordPress blogs

giannim.com — "This is cool. AjaxWp is a lightweight JavaScript enhancement that adds AJAX functionality to WordPress blogs speeding up load times, increasing the responsiveness of the user interface and giving the blog an overall cooler look."

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  • ozguralaz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It is great reference from documentation to download.
    I'll install it
    • rufous, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4In it's "easy" form, this is an abuse of Ajax. It still downloads the whole page in the background and then just stitches it into the current page, conferring zero bandwidth benefit. That is pointless, and actually harms basic usability tenets such as every page having a single URL. Unless you plan on implementing the version that requires extra configuration (which is still questionable), don't use this.
    • MajorD, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I keep hearing AJAX is a great "this and that". Can someone please tell me *why* I would add this to my already-highly-functional WordPress Blog? I bet I'm not the only person wondering this.
    • MAdaXe42, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Shame he took our design - http://www.blubolt.com - we don't mind, but it'd be nice if we were contacted first!
    • MajorD, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"I keep hearing AJAX is a great "this and that". Can someone please tell me *why* I would add this to my already-highly-functional WordPress Blog? I bet I'm not the only person wondering this."

      yeah, I had a feeling people would not be able to elaborate on my reply...
  • Rub3X, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Damn man that's real nice, I'll def give it a try. Dugg.
  • bball2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Excellent work, he did an amazing job of creating the thing, and probably the best documentation to go along with it as well
    • ozguralaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i agree bball2
      it is worth to be home page story
  • axentrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's cool. I like making my own stuff, of course, and inspiration is always dugg ;)
  • patrickalgrim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2cant seem to find the download link.? im probably stupid.
  • dalius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7beautiful! btw, for those who don't know, wordpress 2.0.4 is out.
  • Poco, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Well, I like the idea, but it doesn't even work correctly on his own blog (with firefox). When I click on a link I get the ajax load, but the back button doesn't always work. For example, I clicked on the "making of" link and the clicked on the back button.
    • sk33t, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7It's AJAX. Of course the back button doesn't work.
    • mellowsoon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"It's AJAX. Of course the back button doesn't work."

      The developer claims he has the back button working. It's not.
    • giannim, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0The back and forwards buttons work in all modern browsers except Firefox 2.0 Beta. This will be fixed in the next release.
    • lazka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ff 2 latest nightly here. back button work just fine :)
      only prob is that the page is some kind of flickering before it finished loading
  • arudgick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3looks nifty and all, but the dl link seems borked. tried in both ffx and ie7.
  • Jonathan.C, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1i agree with arudgick, download link just redirects to another post...can someone mirror the package?
  • Kailash.Nadh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Why though?
  • geuisteses, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2All you have to do is right-click on the download link and save as to your computer. Problem is that his server isn't sending the right mime-type for the zip file, so Firefox doesnt know how to handle it.
    • Jonathan.C, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1tried your method, works like a charm, thanx!
      ...gonna test it out on my blog
  • geuisteses, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Gonna try this out. Was going to adapt my less-extensive ajax suite I developed for another project for this new project I'm doing, but I think this will save some time.
  • litespeed59, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Great ... another fine example of adding AJAX to something without considering usability first.
  • Chrysalid, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Will someone explain why everything with "AJAX" in the title always makes the frontpage? I would rather clean my floors with it than read about it all the time.
    • dpk87, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It's a buzzword... however this particular script is nicely done and documented, so I believe it deserves frontpage.
  • christopher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"When a user clicks on a link AjaxWp traps the event and, instead of letting the browser navigate to the target page, requests the target page with AJAX.

    The requested page is then parsed by the AjaxWp engine, filtering out redundant markup (like the header and footer), and inserted in the designated area of the blog."

    So it still downloads the entire page and then has to parse it on the client. Seems to me that using that method, while easier to integrate, removes the bandwith benefit as well as the benefit of a reduced number of queries on the server side when it only has to create a section of the page.

    No thanks.
    • RustIndy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's only in the "easy" mode. The optimized mode requires a little extra setting up (basically just new versions of your theme files with any headers and other repeating code removed) but lets the script receive only the changed parts of the page.
    • christopher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0okay. that is obviously better, but it does not seem to me that there is a method that is easy _and_ very useful. personal opinion, of course. i am sure some will like it a lot. i have not used wordpress in a long time but i imagine if there is a way to nest theme files - which i would hope there is - then it could work well.
  • RawGamer, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1AJAX is overrated. Running code from the client side is not the ideal way to go about it.
  • gquann, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1His blog doesn't work on my Opera Browser (v0.9). After navigating, I see very very light grey text on white background. It's impossible to read anything. Additionally, it seems to load slower than most blogs (might be the fault of my slow PC).

    I actually don't see any benefit from this... sorry. Kudos for the effort, though.
  • natmaster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ahh, the joys of modularity... :)
  • Agent124, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2@sk33t
    What? You can have the back button work in AJAX. Read the following:
    http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/26/ajax-handling-bookmarks-and-back-button.html

    Next time you may want to do your research.

    Edit. Sorry. I meant to reply to a post.
  • iNoles, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3There are people will abuse AJAX..
  • rads, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Classic example of AJAX being used for no reason but the "bling".
  • jerkychew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It has that whole "gee, this is neat" look and feel to it, but it just doesn't work very well. After clicking around a bit, I hit the back drop-down in mozilla and picked the original page I started out in. It brought me to the main page instead, with no sign of the ajax add-on. While I was there I noticed his must-have software list, so I clicked on one of the firefox extension links. When I clicked back, suddenly there I was, looking at the AJAX add-ons again.

    Seems pretty buggy and pointless to me, albeit neat-looking.
  • doyourmath, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I appreciate the hard work that went into AjaxWp. The concept, design and documentation are excellent.

    Unfortunately, AjaxWp:

    1) does not validate (not W3C Standards Compliant).
    2) has some trouble with the back button (works at times but 'breaks' the back button on certain pages), and;
    3) does not implement search engine friendly URLs

    While I may be mistaken, my guess is that search engine bots would have a very tough time getting through sites that use AjaxWp. Poorly written mail harvesting spambots like Psycheclone* would probably get lost in a loop somewhere and eat even more bandwidth than they already do.

    *If you notice a lot of bandwidth being eaten by IP range 208.66.195.0 to 208.66.195.15, that is Psycheclone eating your bandwidth. Ban the IP range. Sorry for the derail.

    Back to AjaxWp...

    While I love the concept and appreciate all the hard work behind this, the above three issues are deal-breakers for me. As much as I would like to implement a dynamic interface, I will wait for version 2.

    Looking at the quality of their work, I trust that they will get a decent community behind them and I look forward to using AjaxWp when the above issues are resolved.
    • giannim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hi doyourmath, let's see if I can clear I few misunderstandings.
      1) Well, AjaxWp is just a transparent layer over the existing wordpress theme, so if the original blog validates, than the I don't see why it shouldn't by adding a few JavaScript files.
      2) Very true, unfortunately the back button is the most delicate part that I'm trying to handle, and will be the focus for the next releases.
      3) Search engines don't see AjaxWp URLs, because as i said in point 1), AjaxWp is just JavaScript. Search engines see the normal URL structure used by your blog be it querystring or mod-rewrite.


  • althe3rduww, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I agree that this is a cool thing for word press users. However, other than changing the theme a bit I am not sure how much this is really "adding new functionality" to the site.
  • Nextrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Personally I feel AJAX has it areas where it can be used as a benefit to display information on a page more efficiently. But then it can be used in the wrong way as well. The real reason why JavaScript (now understand I am not talking about AJAX based engines here) never took off in the past was because of speed and security. And to this day it is still an issue all depended on how it is used.

    Personally I feel this plug-in has many cool features, especially the one to turn off the AJAX load or not. That way the user can set how he wants to view the site. I wonder if this could be stored to a cookie or session as well so that when the user comes back to the site his selection of how he wants to view it will be kept the same.

    It would have been since to see the Rewrite Rule added to the site to work with this plug-in. Seeing this every time I click on a new links feel as if the code is done inefficiently: “index.php#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.giannim.com%2Fprojects%2F|Projects” I know the reason for it, with using java there has to be a better way to pass variables along.

    I still feel loading an entire page of content with an AJAX engine is not worth it. Think about SEO compatibility when the robot views the page, and gets that URL I pointed out above.

    A lot of the AJAX I have seen these days has been more COOL features than actual GOOD features.

    Well just my 2 cents.
    • giannim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The toggle AJAX feature is stored in a cookie (that expires in one year), so if a user decides that he wants the plain old navigation back he can keep it that way.

      Again, the anchor hash technique to store the current URL is just a hack required to trick the browser into thinking that the current page has changed when in reality it really hasn't. But this is ONLY seen by the browser during the navigation session. Web search engines and other "bots" see the normal navigational structure of the blog (be it mod-rewrite or querystring).
      As a matter of fact, you can easily test out how a search engine sees the blog without AjaxWp by disabling JavaScript in your browser. The blog will still be fully functional and behave just like any other Wordpress blog.

      More information on the anchor hashing technique can be found here:
      http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/26/ajax-handling-bookmarks-and-back-button.html
    • Nextrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Gianni

      Thanks for the info, i will check it out.
  • spicytuna, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5AJAX is a hammer, but not everything is a nail.
  • kodeiko, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I haven't downloaded it and used it on my own site but seems like it's reinventing the wheel after clicking around in the author's site.

    Since images are (usually) cached, the header/navigation bits that are redownloaded everytime in the HTML documents are most of the times quite small (thanks to semantic HTML) so I don't see a point in implementing this.

    Besides, it then (sometimes) breaks the back button, and then it uses weird URL (as can be seen on the site itself while browsing). I think this is really redundant.

    Weren't our connection speed supposed to get faster or at least fast enough to handle that few kilobytes of HTML, no?

    No digg. There're better reasons to use AJAX and this isn't it.
  • bball2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I downloaded it, and implemented it on my site:

    http://www.bballcity.com *Work warning (occasional hot chick with a bikini on the front page)

    I think it works really well. I used the quick and simple method so I can still use permalinks and etc and the file size doesn't seem too bad. Using rel="bookmark" on anything that I don't want to load up automatically seems pretty good, and it's not over bloated or anything.

    I used a similar feature before: I got like 10 posts to load at a time, only show the first, then use javascript to alternate between them automatically. AjaxWP works a lot better IMO because you're only loading one thing at a time, and degrades down very well. If you disable javascript, nothing is affected, you just see the regular links.
  • spooniep, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2While AJAX definitely has its place (like for looking up related data without leaving the current page) I'd have to say I think that most this particular implementation is just plain overkill for a blog UI, and frankly I don't think it improves user experience one bit. Most of it just shows off the prototype effects, rather than actually adding any meaningful functionality.

    I'm sticking to clean XHTML/CSS for my blog.
  • drunknjew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1neat. i installed it. i tried bloxpress too. both broke google analytics. mmmmmnothanks.
  • MAdaXe42, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Shame he took our design - http://www.blubolt.com - we don't mind, but it'd be nice if we were contacted first!
    • erictheninja, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's a shame you felt the need to post this twice, too.
  • Damien79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0AJAX is overrated anyway imho.
  • kasted, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1can I have some ajax with a side of tabs please??
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