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.
A big part of my new design is the use a new Blosxom plugin, interpolate_fancy. This plugin, by Blosxom author Rael Dornfest, replaces the default Blosxom interpolation routine with a much more powerful version, allowing many forms of conditionals in addition to straight variable substitution. It also changes the interpolation syntax from a perl-style $var to an XML-like .
The POD documentation for interpolate fancy lists all of the valid syntactical forms, including:
* Unconditionally and recursively (backward compatibility with Blosxom’s standard interpolation)
e.g. include a link to the story’s path using various template variables.
$path
However, this functionality is not implemented. Instead, I converted my templates to the new format. However, my RSS feed uses the flavour templates built into Blosxom (with a couple of tweaks). This flavour, just like the built in .html flavour, use the original interpolation syntax. The net result of which is that my rss feed is broken.
For now, I will make a standalone RSS flavour, to get the feed working again. I will also post this issue to the mailing list, and see if interpolate_fancy should change.
UPDATE: The rss feed is working again. Instead of implementing the built in flavours as external flavours, I enhanced interpolate_fancy to contain updated versions of blosxom’s built-in templates. I’ll post my version here a little later.
The new site look & features are finally up. Be sure to check out the style switcher on the right. Writebacks are now working, so please comment and share your thoughts on the updates. Oh, if you want, you can compare it to the old layout.
I’m done for tonite. I’ll post more soon about all that went into this update. For now, it’s published.
Woohoo!
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Posted September 6th, 2003 at 7:31 am
1 Comment »
I had a sneaking suspicion when I wrote the previous post that something would louse up my plans to update the site on Thursday nite. It’s Friday afternoon, and Lo, no update. Maybe it’s time to give up this programming gig and try prophecy. Anyone know of any openings for prophets, oracles, etc?
Yesterday was another 12+ hour day at work. The good news is, I think I’m over the worst of the hurdles and my hours should start getting back to normal. By the time I got home, I had no energy left for the computer… any computer. Well, except my wife’s computer. She needed some help with something that changed on eBay recently. For her, a few more minutes at the keyboard I could do. Blogging, I could not.
This morning on the way to work (where I am now, catching up on email/blog reading/etc on the laptop while a set of reports ties up my dev PC for an hour), it occured to me that I’m not quite ready to publish after all… I forgot to add IE-specific bugfixes to the CSS. And be-nice-to-Opera rules. Etc. I’m skipping the Netscape4 hacks. Get a real browser.
Plus, I think I need to make a quick refinement to the story template, based on a misunderstanding (on my part) of TrackBacks. That should be a quick fix, at least.
So, hopefully I’ll get the site update published late tonight, but tommorow may be more likely. I am going to get out of here at a decent hour tonight, but them I’m going to do something constructive… like spend some time with my family.
I’ve been busy working on a slew of revisions (including two new blosxom plugins) for the site for days now. I nearly had everything finished last night. I expected to publish the updates, and to start blogging about them, tonight.
Unfortunately, my other (read: paying) job was more pressing today. Working until 9 p.m. does cut into one’s leisure time. The good news is that all of the site enhancements are ready (although I still can’t get Apache redirects to work, to redirect /index.html to /weblog; but that’s another blog entry), and so I should be able to publish everything tommorow night (well, technically tonight, midnight departed over an hour ago) and get back to more regular content posting.
One more day should do it.
Famous Last Words.