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You're enjoying the personal website of Jason Garber — web developer, musician, photographer, and ne'er-do-well operating out of the Washington, DC metro area.

He's nuts about the web, Transformers, music, and microformats. In his spare time, he organizes BarCamps, Refresh DC meetups, and builds good works with friends as 200 OK.

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Reading Mode

If you’ve been paying attention to this site, you’ve likely seen little incremental changes and updates here and there over the last week or so. Iterative design, as championed by 37signals, is all the rage these days and I’m embracing it as much as possible.

I love my new design, more than any I’ve done in the past (and I hope you enjoy it, too!). I swear up and down all day I’m not a designer (I’m not), so it’s rare that I’m pleased with something I’ve designed. I’m more interested in the markup being amazing.

Anyway, I just added a feature I’m rather fond of. At the top of this column, you’ll see a little box with two radio buttons, one labeled “Browsing mode,” the other “Reading mode.” Go ahead, click one. Or both.

Choosing “Reading mode” will fade out all the extraneous data to the top, right, bottom, and left of the content area, allowing you to focus on the important part - the content. I came upon this idea (I’m sure it’s not unique) after staring at the layout of this site and having a hard time focusing on the content (a likely side-effect of my non-designer-ness).

The effect isn’t persistent across pages (yet, anyway) and is built using the jQuery library. I’ll probably get berated by Mr. Chipman or Mr. Keith for relying on a library for something this simple, buuuuuuuuuut it was the quickest way for me to achieve what I was trying to achieve. I’ll break it out one of these days.

So enjoy the new reading mode, I hope you find it useful.

5 Responses to “Reading Mode”

  1. Matt says:

    I really like your “Reading Mode” idea. Great and simple use of jQuery. It definitely makes concentrating on the post itself much easier.

    posted on 19 May 2007 at 10:06 pm Permalink

  2. Grant Hutchins says:

    Great idea!

    posted on 20 May 2007 at 3:31 am Permalink

  3. Patrick Haney says:

    I’m digging the Reading Mode idea. It’s pretty simple and reminds me of the way Virb allows you to go “lights out” when watching a video, making the entire screen black. Easy to implement and a nice user feature.

    posted on 20 May 2007 at 12:03 pm Permalink

  4. Jason says:

    Thank you, sir(s). Now that I’ve been thinking about it, the inspiration was a mix of the Virb effect that Patrick mentions and at least one GTD app for the Mac that blacks out parts of the screen so you can focus on the task at hand.

    posted on 20 May 2007 at 11:05 pm Permalink

  5. Mr. Chipman says:

    jQuery is pretty tiny, so I’ll let it slide this time :P

    Lovely work on adding the Reading Mode option only if scripting is available. You’ve made me proud with that bit, sir.

    posted on 29 May 2007 at 6:41 pm Permalink

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