Sunday, May 29, 2011

Sunday Open Thread

I use these open threads to report on any site maintenance I've been doing.

Some of you may have noticed that about a week ago, for a brief period of time, there was a post rating mechanism under the posts. These interfered with the polls so I removed them. 

In thinking about it, I also realized that, since this blogging business is only a pastime to me, I didn't really want a rating system that might cause me to chase traffic rather than just posting whatever nonsense interested me.

At the same time I was fiddling with the rating system, I also replaced the icons that allow one to share a post on various social media sites. It always aggravated me when the box would pop up if you moved you mouse over one, so I switched to a version without that automatic pop-up feature. 

In the right rail I moved the 'Recommended' links under the 'Blogs of Interest' to group my links to other sites. This required me to move list of 'Contributors' to the far right rail so both they and the blog links would be visible without scrolling down the page.

The most ambitious thing I've done is add a 'By Category' list to the right rail (under the list of Contributors). This allows visitors to review posts in just their area of interest while ignoring topics that don't interest them. I don't know how much people really use things like that, but from time to time I have done that on other sites.

The problem with adding that feature is I've long used the labels to make cheesy jokes, so I'm having to sweep back through all of the posts to tag them properly. At the moment I'm working my way through 2009, and dreading the work 2006 is going to entail. 

Occasionally I am making minor edits to the older posts, but I am not changing their content, only cleaning up any malformed HTML that is causing problems with the site's template.

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