This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 02/01/13
A New Beginning
Well, that went suspiciously easily.
Yes, after just over seven months, JudgeCo™ is delighted to announce that the website is now in Full Revamp Effect.
I did give some explanation back here as to what the hell I was playing at, and I don't really have much to add on that point. The main reason for the change in the site's structure was not so much that readers were telling me that they had trouble finding things (I've never had much feedback one way or the other on any aspect of the site, truth be told), but that I was having trouble finding things.
Instead, some explanation of the new functionality of the site is called for. So, in no particular order:
- The e-mail link is now to be found only at the bottom of the front page. I didn't see the point of having it coded into the navigation bar on nearly every page on the site; besides which, the Javascript which it runs off as a means of preventing spambots from plaguing me was conflicting with the embedding code for videos
- Each item in the Rants, Raves and Not A Blog sections now has its own page. Well, nearly every item. If there are two items for the same date in the same section, they will both be on the same page and links to any such second item have been made by means of 'named anchor' tags in the link, so that the link will take you to the right part of the page. Unfortunately, both Firefox and Internet Explorer have quirks which can cause a problem with these: with Firefox, they tend to knacker up the function of the browser's 'Back' button; and with IE, if you go to the link, then click 'Back' to the previous page, then click 'Forward', it'll take you to the top of the page, not back to the part you were at before. There are, apparently, ways around this, but they all seem to involve Javascript, and I want as little of that here as possible. I'm sure you can live with it - I have to
- You will see an extra button in the navigation bar (left) called 'Topic Index'. In order to make items easier to find, it made sense to break them down into categories or subjects. So clicking on that button will take you to the Topic Index where you can choose from any one of (at present) thirty-eight categories. Clicking on any one of them will take you to a list of posts pertaining to that subject from every section of the site going back to the beginning nearly ten years ago. Just click on the title of the piece in question to go to it
- The Archive for each of the three sections now also appears in list form. Just click on the relevant 'Archive' button on the navigation bar and you'll be taken to (in the case of this page, for example) the Archive page for the Not A Blog section for 2013 (you'll be able to go to another year of the Archive from the sidebar on the left of that page). As with the Topics, clicking on the title of the post will take you to it. This will mean that the Archive page for each year will not grow like Topsy to an inconvenient size as the year progresses
- There is still a 'current' page in each section for the most recent items, but instead of showing each one in full, it will display only the first line or so (or even just the title) of each piece. To read the full item, just click on the 'permalink' icon (it looks like this:
), and you will be taken to the full item
- Similarly, if an item has a later item as a follow-up to it, it will show like this:
. Again, clicking on it will take you to the follow-up
- At the bottom of each item, there will be a link to the Topic Index page(s) relevant to the subject(s) referred to in that item. There may be just one such link (as with this page), or they may be more; the end-of-year pieces that I've done every year of late, encompassing as they do a view of the previous twelve months, will have a set of links which are nearly as long as the pieces themselves
- Erm...I think that's it
Now, perhaps, you can understand why it took seven and a half frigging months to sort out, in amongst other projects, technical problems, illness and the minor inconvenience of The Day Job.
One or two general observations might not go amiss, seeing as we're on the subject:
In going back and proof-reading each item, I have changed very little - only correct some glaring errors of spelling and grammar, make some of the formatting consistent, tidy up some punctuation, update or remove links, that sort of thing (you'll be able to spot removed links by the fact that they look like this). I have not made any amendments which would make me look prescient or less up the wrong tree; what I wrote must remain as I wrote it, the minor corrections I've just referred to excepted.
I've also gone back and validated the code on each page (although, as I said the other day, I ballsed something up with a line of code which I copied to hundreds of other pages; a bulk 'find and replace' in the wonderful Notepad++ - this being my web editing program of choice - got the correction time down to about half an hour). So the pages should display fine on at least Firefox and IE7 onwards. I know a correspondent of mine (Hi, Bill!) was having problems viewing the site on his Android phone, and I doubt if these changes will clear that problem, but that's for another day perhaps.
One thing which was scary about that process was how long it has been since those pieces first went on here. Some of them seem to come via a time-warp, but I can remember writing them! Time and again since last May, I've found myself exclaiming, "Jesus H.! Was that really x years ago!?" The site reaches its tenth birthday in a few months time, but I can still remember the thrill of being 'out there' (or, rather, out here) for the first time.
Apart from rationalising things a bit (and this isn't one of those cases where the word 'rationalise' means 'cut to the bone and sell off what's left to your rich friends', if only because I don't have any rich friends), another reason for doing all this was to - as I thought - reduce the amount of work I need to do every time I put something new on here. In this regard, it has been a wretched failure; previously, each time I added an item, I had to update two pages at most. Now, I have to update at least five: the page itself, the current page for that section, the Archive page for that section and year, at least one Topic Index, and the front page scroller. I just know it's going to take time to get that hang of that, and so things may go missing from time to time.
At least one objective has been met, though; the site is certainly no larger than it was before which - when you have a limited amount of webspace available to you - is a welcome development. I wasn't sure about this when I started, and am pleased that there has been no negative impact on my room for manoeuvre in the future. At this rate, I could carry on for another ten years before hitting my limit.
And I think that's about it. I hope that You, The Reader™ will find that the whole thing has - as Janet Webb used to say - been worthwhile. Now read on...
