backstage
While the the articles themselves remain the soul of this website, the packaging of this soul (the body?) from time to time requires attention too. On this page you can read what I use to make this website, and a log of all the minor tweaks and major revisions I've made over time.
From our policy department
Readers cannot comment to the articles on the website itself, but can email me instead. Although it would be easy for me to enable this, I've decided to not do that for now. This is not so much because I'm afraid you will start posting non-sense, but mostly because I prefer the more personal nature of e-mail, MSN or the phone for follow-up discussions to articles I write.
Under the hood
This site is powered by an amazing content management system called Movable Type. I installed it on my webserver, which is hosted at 1&1 Internet.
Several plugins for Movable Type make my life a lot easier. MT-Notifier sends out the e-mails to those who subscribe to this weblog via e-mail. Feeds makes sure all the sites I have bookmarked get shown on the links page. SmartyPants changes plain ASCII punctuation characters into prettier looking ones on the fly. And behind the scenes I also use Archive Dateheader, MTTagInvoke, MTSQL and Collect, my favorite of all.
The only software on my Powerbook I use to make this site is Safari to access Movable Type and the ultra simple TextEdit to actually write the text.
Changelog
Minor tweaks and major revisions, what follows is a listing of all the changes I've made to the website - all in an effort to make it more user friendly, easier to browse and better to look at.
- TECH TWEAKS
- After 5 years of great service, I decided to move to another provider. The site is now hosted in the USA at 1&1 Internet. This was a purely financial decision, saving me 85% of my hosting charges and in the process providing me with the possibility to host more domains without additional cost. It turns out Movable Type is not all that movable, I had to reconfigure and manually copy and paste way too much.
- Upgraded Movable Type to version 3.33. Not so much because it was needed or had new features, but because I couldn't find the install files of the version I was using.
- Removed all absolute references that had sneaked in over time. The site is now independent of the domain it's hosted on. I'll try to keep it that way.
- DESIGN DETAILS
- For the pages in the Travel category, the sort order is reversed to better reflect the nature of these pages. The most recent article is at the top of the page for all other category pages, but to better reflect the 'trip reporting' nature they are added at the bottom of the page for travel categories.
- Removed the useless footnote attached to every e-mail sent out. None of my readers cares.
- TECH TWEAKS
- Upgraded to Movable Type 3.2. It's a new version, I'm a boy. What can I say.
- Cleaned up the stylesheet.
- Upgraded to MT Notifier 3.4.1, it took me a while to get used to it and the lack of a means to unsubscribe people as an administrator is horrible. But I built my own page to do that, using Leon Kuunders' template as a starting point.
- Installed MTSQL, which was required for the template mentioned above to work properly but will probably come in handy later. It allows me to query the database directly. Also installed Collect, a plugin that collects information from all over the site and for instance builds the list of links from articles.
- Made the filenames for articles (permalinks, which I guess were not so permanent) less Movable Type dependant, they are now based on the time and date of publication. I've also changed the links of footnotes, so there is little chance of two footnotes using the same link and I've decided to use the same method for all supporting files and photos.
- DESIGN DETAILS
- Implemented different color links for external sites, so the reader can see what sort of link it is. Only works on certain browsers, perhaps because CSS3 is a work in progress at the moment. Made some adjustment to the formatting of paragraph headings. Fixed some typography inconsistencies.
- The print versions of articles now display the URL next to the link, I figured this was easier than trying to click a link on a piece of paper.
- Tweaked the homepage a little bit. Removed the 'so far' section and replaced it with a 'currently' heading, which includes the number of weeks to go until the planned moving day. Re-arranged the side-bar and included the most recently added bookmark. Removed category label from 'other recent articles' section on the homepage, they were messing up the layout.
- Removed the 'reading guide' and replaced it with a page 'about this site' and extensive 'backstage' page (this one) about how I make this website.
- Added a dictionary to the site, hovering the mouse over a word will display the meaning of the word. The full dictionary (which will grow over time) can be found on the dictionary page.
- Changed categories, re-assigned new categories to all articles. There were 16 categories for less than 80 articles, which is stupid. I've attempted to make the new categories easier to use and more 'future proof'.
- Added a feature to send a link to a certain article via e-mail to someone else.
- Removed the 'collections' section from the archive page. There have not been any worthwhile collections posted there and I don't see a clear for it in the near future.
- The number of articles listed on the archive page is now limited to thirtyone, with an option to expand to the full list.
- Limited the number of bookmarks and added two sections to the 'links' page. The first is a section in the sidebar which shows some blogs similar to sixtysix called 'other asia blogs'. And below the bookmarks is a list of links I've used in my articles, for easier reference.
- Initial public release of the website.