Notes On The New Design

I was planning to write a fascinating post on all the ins and outs of the new-look site, but then realised that the only person who’d want to read it is me.

So, instead, here are a few little notes:

• The site is now powered by WordPress instead of Movable Type. This means I’ll be spending less time smashing my head off the desk in rage when posting new entries. It also means you can leave comments without waiting for them to be moderated.
• The site design is based on Hemingway, with a lot of modifications, because I couldn’t face learning enough about WordPress to write a theme from scratch. The result is rather messy templates, and even messier CSS. Hey ho. I’ll fix it all up at some point.
• See the wee ‘about’ bit at the top of the page? It’s an hCard. hCard is one of several microformats, which are clever ways of presenting information on the web so that machines can do stuff with it, without getting in the way of the humans reading it. There’s other microformat stuff going on too, using MicroID and xFolk. Some future posts will be microformatted using hReview, geo and the like. Microformats are really rather exciting—if you want to see them in action, try installing the Operator extension for Firefox.
• If you have a look at the bottom of the page, there’s a little bar chart, or ‘sparkline’. It shows activity on the weblog over the last six months or so—the darker and taller the bar, the more stuff was going on. Dinky, eh? I should probably put it somewhere more visible. It’s powered by the SparkStats plugin.

That’s about it, I think. Non-meta posting will resume as soon as I remember how to weblog.

Posted at 1pm on 09/01/07 by Jack Mottram to the site news category.
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Tags: design, meta, microformats, openid, web