jclark.org/weblog

Nickel Tour

So here’s the nickel tour of the new site design. I’ve split it into two lists- general features and Blosxom-specific design features. Among the general features are:

• Cleaned up layout. The prior revision was a basic sketch of what I wanted, but was pretty rough about the edges. The new layout pays attention to details.

• More consistent. The prior version looked different in IE/Win. Thanks to Zeldman’s Book, I was able to address a number of browser differences in CSS implementation. Also of great help as I tried to improve my CSS skills was Eric Meyer’s CSS Book from O’Reilly.

• Style Switcher. The Style box on the right allows you to switch between alternate styles for the site, thanks to the magic of CSS. Currently there are two choices, but I may add more in the future. Also note that if you are using a browser that supports alternate sheets natively, the browser’s style switching interface will work just as well as the links. Thanks to A List Apart for the article Alternative Style by Paul Swoden for the info (and the code).

• Writebacks. Writebacks provide both comments and TrackBacks. All posts now include TrackBack autodiscovery markup for products that support it. To view comments and TrackBacks, to leave a comment, or for the TrackBack pingback url, use the comments link at the end of each entry, or link via the entry title.

In addition, there are a few things going on under the hood, based on this blog’s implementation via Blosxom.

• New plugin: autolink. I’m still polishing, but I’ll try to do the docs and post tommorow. I wrote autolink to save some typing for phrases I commonly link. Autolink uses a tab-delimited config file to store link text, link url, and optional link title. For example, to link the word blosxom to www.blosxom.com, I only have to type blosxom. The results look like this: Blosxom, the corresponding comfig file entry would read:

blosxom    http://www.blosxom.com    The Blosxom Home Page

• New plugin: storystate. Storystate deserves a separate post, which it should get tommorow. Briefly, it just exposes variables that describe the state of the current story. This is used in combination with the new interpolate_fancy plugin to allow a single flavour to react differently based on conditions such as the request url, story comments, etc. To see it in action, click around the site a bit. If you navigate directly to a story (click the title), you’ll see comments and the comment entry form – using the same flavour that generates the full view. I can close comments for an entry by adding a meta tag to the story text. Also, navigating by category produces breadcrumbs at the top of the page, but navigating via the calendar causes the top of page to show you are in the Archives, and when. Click around a bit and see how it all behaves, notice that it’s all done in a single flavour. I’ll try to post more about the plugin, as well as the plugin itself, tommorow.

That’s about a nickel’s worth.

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