Ajax is the thing to use on your Web 2.0 website at the moment, but integrating it on blogs isn’t something I’ve seen before. AjaxWP is an easy to install addition to WordPress which ajaxifies your blog. From the site:

The script operates transparently by parsing the (X)HTML of the blog, and adding onclick event handlers to all links that point to internal blog pages. 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.

Basically, when you click on an internal link on a blog with AjaxWP installed, rather than your browser fetching the new page, the ajax script requests it and it is shown to you without you changing pages. It certainly looks really slick, and probably speeds things up since only the new content is fetched rather than the static areas on a blog.

There are, however, a couple of disadvantages which have stopped me installing it on Gizbuzz. Firstly, it makes all the URLs ugly, and whilst they will work if you send them to other people, I think they would put people of linking and sharing the link with their friends. The other disadvantage is possibly peculiar to Gizbuzz, but the sidebar on the main page of Gizbuzz is different from that on a post page. AjaxWP would not allow for that difference.

Despite my misgivings, if you can’t wait to jump on the Ajax bandwagon, AjaxWP looks like a simple and pretty way to go.