Insomnia-Ending Site Updates

Hey look, it’s another sleep-inducing metapost about site changes! Here’s what’s new:

• Get posts by email. While many of you read this through a feed reader, the main audience of this site actually tends more towards direct visits or email. Given the success of my son’s email newsletter, I’ve decided to offer the same service here via Feedburner. Emails are sent once a day; feel free to give it a try. (Link is at the top of the index, too.)

• Blog consolidation. The front page has undergone another revision (7.0, by my highly-inaccurate count) and several sections have been cordoned off for editing. The material will end up here, so you don’t have to keep hunting through various blogs: The Blue Lamp Cafe has already been merged, while Flotsam and Jetsam and The Bookdragon Tales will undergo some editing before joining the logjam. Other pages are being revised as time permits.

• logjam changes. I recently took the plunge and updated from the 2.x tree of Movable Type to 3.x, and have found a few features I like, like hierarchical categories. The global forwards/backwards pages are gone (they were seriously screwing with my PageRank) and the entry title code has been reworked.

• Quick sidebar, please. The sidebar to the left is an experiment with several services designed to share information: my Shared Google Reader pages, del.icio.us bookmarks, and flckr photos are the first additions. (I’m still undecided about this.)

• Integrated feeds. I’ve also added my del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos into the site feed. The bookmarks will probably take the place of most of the tidbits formerly posted in the web log, but for record-keeping I’ll have del.icio.us post them here under a separate category.

• … Well, almost. Unfortunately, Google Reader doesn’t have the same sort of integration yet with either Feedburner or sending digests via XML-RPC, so those articles will only be available via a separate feed. (This is probably a good thing: I’m worried about overloading the feed with too much noise as it is already. Please let me know if you think this is the case, or if I’m worrying too much.)

• Alternate Stylesheets: gimmicky, slow, gone. Based on some tracking pixels I dropped into the alternate stylesheets for this layout, they’re not getting used. White is nice. So those will probably disappear and make my head code block much simpler. Each page you view currently results in 13 file GETs before any images are requested, which results in slower page loads. Removing those file accesses will speed things up and make the logfiles pretty again.

• Plus la change… Many things are still the same: no comments, the archives run backwards from the rest of the internet, and I still spend too much time talking about computer drama.

What, you’re still awake after all that? Go to sleep!