This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.
Due to some problems with my ISP the site will be somewhat slower at least for the next few days. Some traffic shaping rules were applied to my connection and now it will deliver only half the speed of what it used to. Hopefully, the problem will be resolved in a few days and everything will be back to normal.
In the meantime, I feel like I am back on dial-up, although I have a 512 Kbit/s link…
I think I am done fighting with the design of the site. Currently everything seems to look just fine in Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera. The site also validates without any errors against w3c HTML and CSS validators, meaning that if you are using a standard-compliant browser, than the site should behave. Otherwise – you’re on your own. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not a standard-compliant browser, but it mostly works too. It just shows a couple of glitches here and there and I am not goingto fix them until Microsoft will fix their browser. Yes, I know, that will not happen in any near future. But enough about it.
I have also installed and activated another plugin to make finding things easier – Terong Related Links. Withthis plugin I can clearly link to related articles at the end of each post. The related articles links will only be referencing posts in this blog and not any outside resources. At least for the mean time.
If you see any misbehavior or some missing functionality, please let me know and I will fix it. Don’t take that as a promise though.
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.
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.
New WordPress plugins appear every day or so it seems. Old ones are improving at a constant rate too. Once in a while I revisit plugin directories to see if anything worth installing or upgrading had appeared. Today I discovered a couple of new plugins that I decided to install.
I’ve also found a couple of other plugins that I am planning to install, but they require some work on my behalf and so I left them for after I’ve slept.