Although things may seem quiet on the surface of www.andydesoto.com, I’ve been busy over the last week and a half implementing a bunch of improvements and changes to better suit the aims and reach of this site. If you’re a new reader of the blog, or have dropped by once or twice already, here’s a list of some of the more notable new features:
- Thanks to some gentle prodding by friend and frequent commenter Heidi Cool, the index page here is finally valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Soon, all the pages on this site will fully support interoperability.
- There’s now an iPhone and iPod Touch compatible version of this site, thanks to BraveNewCode’s wpTouch plugin. Revisit the site with one of these devices to enjoy the saucy Apple styling!
- This site features two new pages: the Stream tab, which features all of my recent web activity; and the Live tab, which is linked to my Yahoo! Live account for when I’m video streaming, a feature I hope to take more advantage of in the future. The Calendar page has been taken off the front page since it’s not as relevant in the summer.
- As this site’s scope is pretty large, chances are good you might only be interested in one or two of the topics I write about. To help with this, I’ve linked similar articles at the end of every post to ease navigation to related articles. There may be content-specific feeds in the future, too. Eventually.
- I am now a member of ResearchBlogging.org, the premiere home for blogging about peer-reviewed science articles. If you see a little “Blogging about Peer-Reviewed Research” icon on one of my psychology articles, you’ll know it’s serious stuff.
- Articles on this site are now integrated with FriendFeed, the popular aggregator and social network. You can leave or view FriendFeed comments for any of my articles, now– just take a look near the regular comment form on any post.
Hope you enjoy some of these changes! As always, let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see new or changed on the site, just send me an e-mail or leave a comment.
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3 Comments
Great progress Andy!
But since you asked, here is something I’ve been pondering. Your categories are really the only part of the medium blue sidebar that are primary navigational items.
Instead of listing them all there, perhaps you could try just having “Categories” as an element in the top horizontal menu. This could go to a page that lists them all, such as my categories page on Webdev. It’s nothing fancy, but it holds them all and once your category list gets longer it may be more convenient. I assign multiple tags to each of my entries, so that is another reason my list grew longer.
To make room for this you could put your contact info in the About page.
Also I’m not sure if Media is the right name for that section. Perhaps Projects would be more descriptive? That could be just me, I’d ask for multiple opinions on that.
So those are my thoughts for the day. Keep up the great work! - H
Glad you like ‘em! I think both of your ideas are good ones– I implemented the Media to Projects idea right away, since it wasn’t too technically challenging, although I will have to mull over some possible synonyms. Maybe while I’m at the gym tonight; “Works” is another idea I had but a bit too pretentious for my tastes.
As for the category idea, I think that makes sense but will need to sit down a little later and try to find a WordPress plugin that will enable me to do what you’re suggesting with minimal hassle. Gimme a day or two!
Thanks for the great advice!
any updates coming ?