Thanks for bearing with me during this transition and all of these ‘meta’ posts. I’m glad that the feed from this site seems to be working, tho I’m still getting a red [!] in Bloglines. If you’re getting this too, and it bothers you as much as it bothers me, you can use these feeds directly:
http://www.walkingpaper.org/feed
http://walkingpaper.org/comments/feed
I like that the old feed contained both entries and comments, maybe some of you didn’t. I could consolidate these two with a third party (like feedburner) but don’t really like that idea. At any rate, now you can pick and choose.
There are a number of new things at this site, and I’d like to take a moment to point them out:
–General usability. Every page has a title telling you where you are. Many people entered the old site in one of the category based archives through google and probably had no idea where structurally they were. Also, I’ve detracted away from close to complete minimalism, and made my links (except permalinks) red. This is easier than having links black and underlined, especially when there are book titles underlined.
–Search. This is a nice thing to have, but perhaps my implementation makes you want to cry. It is a ‘live search’ type feature and I’m not convinced it is particularly usable.
–Popular posts. Here you will find posts that have either generated conversation, see significant traffic, or I otherwise like.
–Date based archive. Isn’t it wierd that there’s no default date based archive in textpattern. I never bothered to work one up for the old site so there never was one. I don’t think calendars are necessarily the most useful navigational tool, but it is nice to be able to see posts from certain months.
–Newish categories. Better categories. These will likely get refined even more.
–Tags. To complement the categories. A cloud of tags can be seen on the archive page. Sadly, there’s not a great solution for users adding tags, but I’d love to try that out. It was a fascinating excercise to tag all of my posts, and the result informed me about the subjects about which I’ve been writing.
–About page updated. This has been slightly updated to include a short list of some likes and dislikes. Just for fun.
–Custom 404. With a picture of a mean lion. Try it out.
–Newish commenting. From what I’ve read, I’d be wise to put in a spam control plugin ASAP. Anyone have a favorite? Comments on the old site were disabled after a week, and this prevented any spam from getting in. Period. It may have done so at the expense of usability tho. Not long after the new site was up, someone and I started to have a conversation about downloading at the October 24th post titled that was quick.
There two known issues with the new site, well, three if you count the red [!] in Bloglines. The biggest known issue is old links into walkingpaper. As of now, they redirect to http://www.walkingpaper.org/old with a bit of an apology. Either Blake and I are going to figure out how to correct this the ‘easy’ way, or I’m going to have to do some matching of post ids and redirect things manually. Ouch! The other issue is that this layout fails a bit in FireFox/Mac, which really shocks me. Any suggestions are welcome. And please do let me know what other bugs you find.