As my spring break draws to a close, so too does the time allotted for tinkering with this site. Some guys have cars up on blocks; I tinker with my computer and my web site. I also apologize for any bizarre glitches you may have seen. I don’t have a production server and a test server, so I pretty much test changes by putting them on the site and squinting to make sure everything looks right. Some changes of note:
- Lots of layout tweaks. The typography should be somewhat better; I’m using a more sensible line width and line height, and something that might even be mistaken for a standard grid. Behind the scenes, it’s all divs and CSS now, with no tables.
- The archives are now accessible directly through the left sidebar. The right sidebar links now have an archive.
- I’ve added an Atom feed for the right sidebar linkblog (“Mindless Link Propagation”) so you can pick up my short link posts in your feed reader. Under the hood, all feeds on the site are now Atom feeds; the old feeds have been redirected to the new ones.
- I’ve set up a new category of reviews interleaved with ordinary blog entries. These show up with titles hyperlinked to someplace you can acquire or learn more about the item in question, and with my rating from one to five stars. (I also have an icon for zero stars, but I’m not sure what it would take to get me to use it.)
- The left sidebar now has a “recent comments” section. All the cool bloggers were doing it. Several years ago.
- I’ve cleaned up the URL scheme I use for archives. The old system had one very annoying property that made every new post a roll of the dice with history itself on the line. No more. The past is safe again.
- I’ve removed file extensions (e.g. “.html”) pretty much throughout the site, and changed the site from being www.laboratorium.net to just laboratorium.net (without the sextupleu in front). These are both to do with decrufting the URLs I generate to make them easier to read and less likely to break in the future.
- I’ve added a print-specific stylesheet, which omits the left and right sidebars to create a printer-friendly version when you use your browser’s print command.
And yes, this is how I like to spend my leisure time.