Updates to the site

Just a quick follow-up to this post from a few weeks ago. I’m not completely done, but some of the biggies are at least in place:

• Cleaned-up archives. In the top-right at the weblog, you now get a calendar of the current month, a drop-down list of all previous months’ archives, a drop-down list of all categories on the weblog, and access to the search engine.


• Category-specific RSS feeds. In folding my Howard Dean weblog together with this one, it occurred to me that some of you may not be interested in my various interests. So you can now go to the Category RSS page to get a list of all RSS feeds available by category. Note: this is a work in progress, as I’m still back-filling categories on my 1300+ posts. Should be finished in the next few days.

• As a result of the drop-downs above, I was able to clean up a lot of the filler on the right-hand side. This isn’t done; I still need to make the blogroll more manageable and current. Open to ideas.

Over at the old Dean blog, I deleted the archives, and used .htaccess to redirect requests to /dean2004/* to /tins. I love it when things work out as they should: all old inbound links (from Google, for example) now resolve properly to the pages’ new home at tins.

Still to come: Implementing a “related browsing” feature on a per-post basis, minor improvements to the presentation of posts, and (hopefully) adding in some context-sensitive links to appropriate books at Amazon from certain posts.

Also working: I installed PHPWiki about a month ago. I’ve now created a macro (using MTMacro) that will let me create a wiki page automatically from my blog (or link to an existing page). Example: Wiki.

I haven’t fully implemented this yet, but the idea is that as I hit on a topic that I want to explore in more detail, I can put a <wiki> tag around the word(s); PHPWiki automatically creates a page focused on the subject and holds it open for me until I can start editing it. It will also be open for others to edit, so it becomes a bit of a collaborative space for readers of this blog to visit. (For those who don’t know: a wiki is just an application that creates web pages that are editable from within the browser. If you see something you want to change, update or remove: you just click the “edit” button. It turns out to be a great way to give people the ability to maintain content on the web.)