Fixing site operations

I hope everyone voted in the MCSG elections today. That's the nice thing about Macalester: you get to vote to oppose forms of domination like capitalism and heteronormativity.* I would like to see St. Thomas and St. Kate's dare to offer such a resolution...

I have made some serious changes in the inner workings of the site, as some may have noticed. Now, when you go to an archive entry like the classic "Battle for Mesopotamia," there are 'breadcrumbs' that lead you back up the hierarchy of days / months / years, although I haven't developed a year index yet.

Also, the URLs for archive entries are now different, such that each entry is down inside nested year, month and day folders, while the actual entry has its title in the URL, such as http://www.hongpong.com/hp-archives/2003/03/26/the_battle_for_mesop.html . I have a nice little yellow box that tells which topics have been deemed relevant to the post.

I have made index pages for each category work a little better, and there are now month archives, but there is a strange glitch in there that I haven't fixed (with the blue "posted XY date" bit appearing intermittently).

I have also improved the master archive listings, but they are not quite as good as I would like.

For now, I am leaving all the old log entries' HTML files in place, so that search engines and people who (anyone?) might have linked here will still be able to access it. However these pages can no longer be reached from the site normally.

So in other words, it is still progressing, even though what I changed this week was really the nut of what seemed incomplete to me. Also the About Me page is nice but relatively uninformative and pointless. I would really appreciate any suggestions, so email or instant message me with your ideas.

I am also hoping to get some kind of aesthetically pleasing photo / image gallery system that actually integrates with the site working, but I haven't found good stuff to do it with yet.

I am also planning to put together a little floating box at the top of the front page with my key links for following the news, and highlighting various special features on the site that have vanished into the archives.

Here is a nice site with really excellent layout and a lot of tips: Bryan Bell. He has a link today to a huge batch of great OS X icons representing all different types of Mac hardware. Time to get a 512K hard drive icon.

*Yes, the computer's spell checker does not understand what 'heteronormativity' is.

Posted by HongPong at April 15, 2004 04:48 PM
Listed under HongPong-site , Technological Apparatus .