Teaching new tricks, or how not to write a novel

So in theory I’ve been participating in Nanowrimo again this year. So far I’ve put in enough words for one day of effort on a straight line average basis.

On the other hand I’ve gotten lots of other stuff done, so I consider this to be a success.

My largest accomplishment was a reworking of my blog templates. From a broad design standpoint nothing huge has changed. But I’ve made all sorts of little improvements. Including:

• Comment forms on static pages, so you can see the blog entry while you’re commenting on it.
• Comment listings no longer direct to just a listing of the comments, but to the individual archive page, so you can see the entry and the comments on the same page.
• Yearly Directories. This was the most important part I think. My templates were last updated sometime in 2004, and at that point 18 months or so was a reasonable list. I’m upto thirty four months of blog entries. That just got to be a little insane to navigate, and often it the menubar was longer than the entry.
• Related links at the top. I reworked the sitewide template to allow a “topper” to be added to the menubar. The benefits of this is that the most likely to be accessed links are at the top of the page. No digging in below the search box.
• In general a better visual language for the menubar. I’ve broken it up with lines into their own boxes, so I can group links into more logical categories, instead of just having huge lists
• I’ve added an Atom 1.0 feed, and stopped linking to my RSS 1.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds. (They’re both there since there is no pressing reason to remove them, you just have to have already linked to them.)

To provide a little perspective on this, the Path to Enlightened Insanity via Defacted Musings, has gone from being driven by 16 templates to being driven by 25 templates. A majority of the preexisting 16 templates were also significantly changed.

My next focus is going to be implementing some templates and tags to reduce the size of my HTML pages, as they’re getting to be a bit big. (One HTML file is actually a whole megabyte on its own.. thats all text, no pictures!) After that I need to roll out my mailing list that I’ve had around more or less for a couple years, without advertising it..

Oh, yeah and all of this work is going ontop of Movable Type 2.64. Those of you who know blog software will think I’m crazy, but its like a VW Bug. It keeps going until you just decided to kill it. At the moment it does everything I need it to do. Sure I’ve stretched it with some plugins and some Server Side Include driven magic, but it keeps on trucking as a nice cornerstone to my website.

I’d replace it but I’m not inclined to rebuild everything.