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