Blog Changes | February 4, 2004

Unlike most bloggers who are constantly tweaking their blogs, my site has remained largely unchanged since it started. As such, I decided it was about time to do some tweaking.

Firstly, I though my old Hicksesque flower icon had started to look a little plain, so replaced it with a slightly more candy like version. This has also been reflected in my favicon, although if you’re on Safari you’ll have to delete your icon cache to see any difference.

Quite liking this new icon, I created a little arrow icon as well. I’m using this in the archive section on the right hand side of my homepage. I thought all the links were starting to blend in too much, so am using these icons to distinguish the archive sub nav from the other links.

Also on the right hand side, I’ve slightly tightened up some of the spacing between links, and have moved some of the items around to better reflect their importance. I’d quite like to delete some of them as there is far too much happening in this area. However I can’t really decide which bits to remove.

My images were also looking a little flat and lifeless, so have added a Dunstanesque image style to pretty them up a bit.

Next I started reorganising my files/MT templates. Everything was a bit of a mess as essentially I grafted my blog on-top of the default MT templates and never got round to changing them. Most of the changes won’t be noticeable, although I have changed my archive page so it’s broken down by month or by category. Originally it was a full list of posts, which was fast becoming unusably long.

I then added a few MT plugins including MT-textile and SmartyPants. I also added an MT plugin called Amputator in order to control those pesky unencoded &’s.

Lastly I installed the extremely useful MTW3CValidator plug-in. This little fella automatically validates my homepage when I make new posts, and if the page is valid, displays a button. Now I no longer have to worry about people moaning about having a validation button on a page with improperly encoded &’s.

Posted at February 4, 2004 8:35 PM

Comments

Petr Weida said on February 4, 2004 10:02 PM

There it is bad link to MTW3CValidator:

[a href=”“][span class=”caps”]MTW3C[/span]Validator[/a]

jay said on February 4, 2004 11:12 PM

liking your site very much Andy B. - I’m busy sneaking around your css as we speak to see how you do things. I notice that images that are also links get an underline and a drop shadow. Its barely noticeable but looks slightly odd. Is it what you intended?

Jeff Croft said on February 4, 2004 11:59 PM

And it looks like you also added the text-shadow property for us Safari users (something I also did a while back). Looks great! Keep it up! :)

Jeff

Cranial said on February 5, 2004 2:56 AM

I have also instaled MTTextile 2.0 and Smartypants. As yet the smartypants functions have not worked i.e. “curly quotes.”
It possibly due to the style sheets I use or another reason. Anyone have a solution?

Amit Karmakar said on February 5, 2004 4:51 AM

Andy, Thats great! You sure have put in some work here. You might like to upgrade your MT version unless you already have? All lookin good! you might also like to look into MT Blacklist from Jay Allen. Gotta luv Smarty Pants and Textile. There’s some love there! :-)

Aleksandar Vacić said on February 5, 2004 9:32 AM

It’s a matter of taste, but I prefer the old, flat flower - excellent work in small space. Adding 3rd dimension on such small space…well, if it was redish it would like meat chops.

Rob said on February 6, 2004 1:21 PM

I’m at work using IE 5 windows and the heading and flower icon overlap and looks v.messy. I’m sure it will look lovely when I get home and boot up safari :)