Friday, September 28, 2012

Basic Site Improvements

Update: I've decided to do the sane thing and give up on the target of one post/day; instead, I'll shoot for one post/business day. That way I have the weekend to catch my breath, and I don't have to fret about Sat/Sun posts going unnoticed. See you Monday!

I'm new to Blogger, so I just spent a night learning about it and making a series of small but useful improvements to the site:
  • Added jump breaks on all the previous articles so only the first few paragraphs show up on the front page. That way you can glance at all the posts quickly without having to scroll down forever.
  • Added a navbar with page links and a custom Ember Search box.
  • The search box is powered by a Google Custom Search Engine that is configured to only search across a small set of (IMO) the most important Ember references and resources. You can see the site list on the Ember Search page.
  • Added a Community page, which is basically a cheat sheet of links to critical resources.
  • Created a FeedBurner feed, which has all kinds of cool features and benefits.
  • Added a prominent RSS icon and link for the feed.
  • Added a "Subscribe via email" widget. (Email updates aren't my style, but I figured some people out there might prefer it.)
  • Categorized all the posts, and added a Category list to the sidebar. (The Meta category is for posts about this blog.)
  • Replaced the lame default Blog Archive widget with Helplogger's fantastic Recent Posts widget.
I'd like to thank these two blogs for the great advice and explanations which enabled me to figure all this out quickly:

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for the great work you're doing on this site. It's already become my goto place for (almost) all things Ember. Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete