Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-10-03
Month: October 2005
More disturbances
If you thought that I’m done with changes, think again. There is plenty going on behind the scenes. In fact, so much is changing that I better write about it before I forget.
For starters, I messing around with the theme. I didn’t manage to make it look exactly like I want yet, but I succeded in braking browser compatibility. It only looks nice in the Firefox now. Konqueror is the second runner up. It looks almost as good, but with few pixels moved left and right here and there. MSIE on the other hand is totally screwed. The funny thing is that the both HTML and CSS validate against w3c.org just fine.
Than there are categories and tags. With excuses to McDonald’s advertising campaign – I’m loving it! I am talking about the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. I like it so much that I have removed all the categories today, except for the default one which just has to be there. Yes, you’ve heard me right. There are no categories for posts at all now. Tags only.
What’s so good about it you might ask. Well, plenty. Firstly, it imported all categories as tags. Than it imported all my Technorati tags too. Than it gave me an nice administration interface to manage tags. And than it has these totally cool concept of tag synonyms. I’ve been thinking about this for a year or so now and I was stunned to find it in this plugin. Basically, I can assign synonyms to tags and thus decrease the number of tags used on the site without losing any functionality. For example, I configured “Cyprus” to have synonyms “Nicosia”, “Lefcosia”, “Lefkosia”, “Paphos”, “Pafos”, “Limassol”, “Limassos”, “Larnaca”, and “Larnaka”. Now you can use any one of this sysnonyms or tag itself to get the same results. Consider for the moment the same synonym defined for two different tags!
With all these huge changes I of course have a lot of stuff to take care of. My usage of tags was very chaotic before. I didn’t have any naming scheme what-so-ever. My categories were marked badly in some cases. Dumping this all into tags scope didn’t make it all much nicer. I am fixing it all over the place and you might see gradual improvements. But even if you don’t,
stay with me. It’ll me over before you know.
Partial solar eclipse
I’m not very much interested in astronomy and movement of spacial bodies, but when something major goes on I jump on the bandwagon and enjoy the show. Today I watched the partial show eclipse that happened around 13:00 and that I would have missed if it wasn’t for the guys in the office who went semi-insane about it.
In compliance with Murphy’s Law I didn’t have my camera with me and couldn’t make that authentic picture that you see above. But talking about solar eclipse without showing a picture is like eating French fries without ketchup, so I had to cheat. I draw the picture in Gimp and in my opinion it represents what I saw fairly good.
Rest in peace, Poly…
I am in shock and deep sadness. I just found out that Polis Potamitis has been shot to death on September 19th, 2005.
New theme and new functionality
As you can see (unless, of course, you’re an RSS reader) I am working on a new theme for the site. The new theme is wider and utilizes screen space better. It also looks better and more consistent across different browsers.
But the new look is not the only thing that I am working on. There are some navigation changes and design simplifications (hopefuly). Long lists of categories and monthly archives are gone from the sidebar of the front page. They’ve been moved to the dedicated Archives page (more on it in a second), which is linked to from the top of all pages.
The top of the page also includes the link to the photo albums marked as Gallery. Many people were requesting this and I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier.
I have also installed and configured Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin which allows to integrate tagging deep into the site. The integration process hasn’t finished yet, so I’ll have to update you on the functionality later on.
One bit that I will notice now though is the tag cloud that is available in the Archives page. The tag cloud represents most used tags and allows quick navigation to posts marked with those tags. The bigger the tag name more often it was used.
Anyway, as you can understand, the site undergoes some changes now and might not be very stable. If you encounter an empty page, broken link or an ugly message with debug dump, please don’t shoot me just yet. Everything will be back to normal very soon. Also note that none of the old functionality should be lost. If I forgot to enable something that you used before and thus can’t anymor, please drop me a line.