Thursday, October 4, 2012

Basic Site Improvements 2

My desire to improve the layout and features of this site has distracted me from creating new content for a few days, but I think the effort was worthwhile.

Changelog
  • Moved the Ember Search box out of the navbar to the top right corner to make room for more nav links.
  • Created a bookmarklet that submits selected text to the Ember Search engine. To use, drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. When you want to lookup something Ember-related, highlight the text on the web page you want to submit as your query and click the bookmark. (If you haven't selected anything, you'll be prompted to enter a query.)
  • Added a Titles link in the navbar which goes to an archive page that lists the title, date, and labels for all posts, with sorting and filtering. (Thanks to Matt Mozz for this archive widget.)
  • Added Next/Prev post title links to the top and bottom of every post page — and reversed the default Blogger order which makes absolutely no sense whatsover... who's idea was it to put Next on the left and Prev on the right? (Thanks to MS-potilas for the initial hack, which I then tweaked.)
  • Added bullets to the left of all subheadings in non-Meta posts (and appropriate static pages) which are both named anchors and links to themselves. Now you can give someone a link directly to a subsection of a post here, just like with Markdown docs on GitHub.
  • Added LinkWithin's Related Posts widget to the bottom of all post pages. Then I went back and added at least one image to all previous posts so there'd be some kind of thumbnail, including this beautiful 3D rendering of Bag End, for which I received permission to add to the top of my first post.
  • Speaking of first post, I added a link to it at the top of the sidebar to make it easy for new visitors to jump straight to the beginning and read the blog sequentially using the Next links.
  • Replaced the clunky RSS and Email Subscription widgets with this elegant (and compact) set of linked sprite icons, then added a Google +1 button below it. Perhaps you'd like to go click on it?  :)
  • Added this numbered page navigation widget to the bottom of all index (multi-post) pages.
I'm pleased with the result, and will be turning my attention back to actually writing posts now. Unless... you can think of something else that I should change?

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