Website Improvements
I haven’t been posting much lately because I have been working hard to improve the experience of visiting this website. You may ask what does that mean? - well it is simple. I love going to websites that are uncluttered, provide useful information and are to the point. It’s also small things like having a really fast page load time. So here’s a flavour of some of what I have been working on lately…
Navigation improvements
- Brand new menu, which can hold nested menus, images and more (much more flexible).
- Proper Sitemap, Atom and RSS feeds
- Accessibility keys can now be used to navigate to every page on the menu (for screen readers)
Speed improvements
- Blockquotes are now 100% CSS - no images. Other post elements will follow when CSS3 allows.
- I am in the process of downsizing all images to thumbnail size (as a bonus if you click on it you’ll get beautiful full size image goodness)
Maintainability Improvements
- All posts are now written in Markdown, which is like plain text. Makes me updating old posts with bad info way easier.
- The history of every page in the repository and can be referenced and restored (indeed I use it to constantly roll out and back changes/improvements).
- Permalinks will be provided at the end of each page. Posts can be safely linked to now and should always work.
- I’ve started adopting Microformats around the site as a way to feed search engines and crawlers more useful information on both myself and the websites content
- Similiar to Microformats, I’ve marked up posts so services such as Readability and Instapaper should have no trouble parsing out all the stuff they don’t need (such as site navigation, comments etc.)
- Images are getting or will have alternative tags for the visually impaired.
and more to come…
There is still going to be a lot of broken posts for various reasons - I am doing my best to review and update as many as I can. Unfortunately changing blogging platform and having 150+ posts (since 2004) doesn’t make updates easy, but once things are fixed I’ll have a better idea of how to avoid such mess in future. Do contact me if you see any I have missed!