I spent the greater part of yesterday, and part of today, experimenting with things like output caching for JavaScript widgets, tweaking various parts of my theme, testing program flow with PHP, and testing effects using CSS. This probably sounds really mundane to the average person, but it's the stuff I learn and like to pass on when I discover something new and not well known.

I found out that it really isn't worth it to try and cache JavaScript widgets because of their dynamic properties. I just wish the designers would offer image-based (like MyBlogLog) widgets that defeat the hang-ups caused by slow responding scripts.

PHP has so many different ways to control program flow, it's mind-boggling. You can use conditional "if" statements and case statements, just to name two of them. After reading many, many tutorials, I found that many programmers forget about one aspect: Fall through. An "if/else" statement can be reduced to just an "if" when there's only one condition to test for. It will fall through to the next part of the program if the condition evaluates to false.

CSS (custom style sheet) properties really can do everything that tables, rows and data cells used to be used for. No one noticed when I removed the tables from my header and started using only CSS properties. I didn't write the table data as part of the theme (the theme designer did), but had added an additional cell. When I replaced the standard search with the Google search, that's when I switched to CSS properties for the design. Yesterday, I tried to use CSS to adjust the vertical alignment of the FeedBurner chicklets, but they just wouldn't cooperate. So I did something different and scrapped any attempts at styling it. I did manage to get the "single page footer" altered though, and added RSS icons down there.

I never realize how time-consuming these things are until after I've spent hours doing them.