Release 1.1

Thursday, 2 Feb 2006 | Blogging

In an attempt to follow up on the ideas I had about possible changes to this site, I used the recent upgrade of the Movable Type software I use to make this site as a motivation to make some changes to the website. For a complete list of all the changes I’ve made, check the (new) backstage page. I’ve compiled a short summary here.

• Cleaned up, re-installed and upgraded all software and plugins to the latest version. The worst of which was a mandatory upgrade of MT-Notifier which I use to automatically send out all new articles via e-mail. It was completely changed, now lacks a management interface and so took a while (and some hacking of myself) to work comfortably.
• New categories, because the existing ones were too many (16 categories for 75 articles!) and I wanted to change them in light of recent conclusions. I’ve also implemented tagging in the background, but the number of articles on this site is to low for it to be a useful new way to search the articles. I did implement it so I can already add tags to the articles now, to protect myself for future misery.
• Edited the reading guide, which is now a short ‘about’ that introduces the site and a ‘backstage’ page which is really only interesting for other bloggers to look at.
• Foreign words are no longer explained in the text itself, but moving the cursor over such a word or expression will display the translation or meaning.
• And I also tweaked the design and interface in many ways. Check backstage for a full list, but I do want to point out a cute little feature I added which shows the number of weeks until my currently planned date of departure in the ‘Currently’ section on the homepage.

I considered implementing the ‘quick notes’, but decided against it for now for lack of a clear use. Although I don’t think a whole lot of people link to this site right now, the reason for not enabling trackbacks is mostly because I’d do it for ego-boosting purposes only - hardly a valid reason for all that work.

I thought long and hard about perhaps allowing you (the readers) to comment on the articles on this site, but decided against it because the feedback volume I get now is fairly low and don’t see that changing in the near future. I have been considering asking others to contribute an article to the site, but am still working on that idea.

Ofcourse, the best way to see all these changes is to simply browse around the site!