We endeavored this morning to render an ordered list of desired changes to this weblog as part of our ongoing redesign-cum-restructuring, and could find no compelling reason (other than the absolute vanity involved, of course) to not make such a list public. We'll update this list as it (inevitably) grows. The list:
abbr and acronym religiously. We should be exploiting these elements to create a posts-by-abbreviations feature similar to Mark Pilgrim's posts-by-citation. We'd rather include this information within archive pages, instead of on a separate page, as Mark has done.We're happy to be the ten-billionth person to cite Dunstan Orchard's blog as a wonderful source of inspiration. Dunstan's doing more to make his blog beautiful and usable than nearly anybody else we read regularly. To wit: the best, most friendly weblog error-handling we've ever seen; extremely useful "blogged people" and "blogged domains" features (more info); an elegant, innovative tabbed menu interface; a complete and intuitive archiving scheme; and most distinctively, a dynamically-generated, ninety-image header panorama, which, as Dunstan describes, "depict[s] the same scene under a different weather condition, time of day, and (at night) phase of the moon" according to current conditions. Dunstan's raised the bar.
There's probably more to come. Let us know what we should be doing better.
We've made a few changes to our del.icio.us script. Of note:
We're aware that there are several scripts now available for displaying your del.icio.us links -- there weren't nearly as many when we released the first version of this script -- but ours works great for us, so we're happy to make it available. As always, let us know about any bugs or weird behavior.
The files:
Update: A bug related to the bug mentioned above -- the one that fixed the handling of HTML entites -- has been fixed. In addition, we've added two more templates to the package, both of which use the HTML definition list syntax. These are our preferred templates; we meant to include them originally. Keep in mind your browser may have cached del.icio.us.pl.zip. You might need to clear your cache to get the new package. Keep that feedback coming.
Update: We noticed today that the default 'tag' variable was set to 'site,' which is the tag we use to filter del.icio.us links. This really shouldn't have been included in the downloadable script. We've changed the script to set no default tag.
We're in the throes of a redesign, scouring the Web for inspiration and (as previously mentioned in our link log) particularly enjoying the latest look of D. Keith Robinson's Asterisk. Notable, among other things, is that D. Keith's new design features only the three latest posts on the front page (down from seven). Paul Scrivens, too, chose to limit the number of front-page entries when he redesigned his popular Whitespace late last year. A more extensive search reveals that several big-name bloggers -- Jeffrey Zeldman and Mark Pilgrim among them -- have recently reduced the number of full entries on the main pages of their respective sites. As both a designer and reader of weblogs we're torn between our desire to create a concise and attractive front page, and our instinct to keep as much content as necessary highly visible and immediately available to first time and infrequent visitors.
We'll be following the page length conversation at D. Keith's site for ideas on what to do with our new design. As always, we welcome your thoughts, too.
School keeps us pretty busy -- we returned this semester after a rather regrettable hiatus, which accounts for the recent lack of activity in this space -- but we occasionally favor improving this site over more important duties. Stay tuned.
Dave Shea shows how small pieces of information about your site can be unintentionally sent to other servers over which you have no control. Referers, for example, contain a link to your site, which may be published on other sites and indexed by Google, even if your site is behind a password.
We've run into this before, so we know it's a little scary to see public information about a section of your site you consider private. Dave's now using a redirect to hide links to specific pages:
By creating a generic redirect.php in a public-facing directory, and parsing each and every single link in the protected directory to bounce through the redirect first, and then on to the destination, the referral will appear to come from that script. We can't mask that it's coming from the domain completely, but we can prevent the directory structure of our internal weblogs from being exposed. This is good enough in our case.
We can't argue with good enough, but, as far as we can tell, it is possible, in the referer, at least, to "prevent the directory structure of internal weblogs from being exposed" by simply spoofing the referer field. Our Pingback client, for example, generates a referer to the relevant linking document, not the script sending the ping.
All this is really immaterial since Dave, like us after our run-in with the same problem, is at least thinking about controlling the dissemination of information on protected areas of his sites. It's a tedious and frustrating task worth the trouble.
On Selling Out
We've recently been accepted into the Google AdSense program and may begin serving ads on archive pages this week. It's an experiment we'll monitor closely for effectiveness. It'll be a glorious day when this site pays for itself or -- gasp! -- turns a (meager) profit, but those ads are damn ugly, so, you know, we'll see.
It's easy as hell to forget about cross-browser testing -- we do, after all, serve our pages as proper XHTML, which only works in a select number of browsers, anyway -- but we've at least made a cursory attempt to ensure that this site looks and works as expected in your browser of choice. Dave Shea's recent browser report, inspired by the return of thecounter.com's long-running browser summary, is an updated look at which browsers to support and why. Good stuff, indeed.
Postscript
Some navel-gazing reveals what we've long expected: more of our visitors use Mozilla or Firebird than use any version of Internet Explorer or Netscape. In no way representative of general browser trends, but encouraging, nonetheless.