Michael Brunton-Spall     About     Archive     Feed

Some new features

2009-10-10 01:07:18 +0000

So I've finally added a couple of new features, so thought I'd pop up a quick explanation of what I did and why.

Firstly, you should hopefully have noticed that everything got bigger, a lot bigger.  Looking around at a number of websites, and then at mine, I realised that on any screen other than my netbook, I had to squint.  For a site that is designed around readable content, that's a bad thing.  Not sure I'm totally happy with how big it is, so let me know if you think it's ugly big, or nice big.

Let me know, I've said that before, on the basis that the 4 people who've looked at this site so far are friends of mine and will let me know somehow.  But the first comment I got on the site was "You asked for feedback, but I can't give it".  I tried, actually quite hard, to add a facebook comment box, using the fancy new facebook connect API.  And while adding a comment box itself was easy, the scripts make a lot of weird calls that I didn't expect, Adding the connect button only if you're not already logged in requires some very strange javascript foo that I don't appear to possess, and I could not get comment counts out at all.  Instead Paul Carvill suggested I try Disqus, which took me all of 25 minutes to add to the post page.  Since Disqus also supports facebook, twitter, openId and so forth as a login system, I figure it's probably a win all round.  

Final little change, the tags are now applied to bookmarks.  I've not gone back through the bookmarks yet to add tags, but I'll try to get through them soon.  At the moment it's pretty useless, but I'll add a link so you can see articles by tag, which once there is more than 5 or 6 articles will be useful.

Next steps, I need to work on pagination, since I'm reaching the limit of articles and bookmarks that can fit on the front page.  I've added an RSS and ATOM feed, but I need to add some logo's or links of some sort, and I guess a picture of me, or some form of picture would be nice.  The most technical next thing is the desire to add an automatic tweet when i post a bookmark or article, and linking bookmarks into delicious.com to create a delicious bookmark.

So you can now leave comments on my pages to let me know that you hate the new big fonts.