I've been sitting here for nearly three hours converting a movie from avi format into something I can burn to a DVD. I've been doing it for a local client of mine since he can't. The annoying part about this is the program I use to convert movie file types maxes out my laptop's processor so I can't really do anything else but let the conversion software run. Lots of fun.Anyway, I've made a number of changes to the blog, hopefully improving things:
- I've fixed a number of broken layout issues that I've noticed over time. Had to track down a couple of them but I believe I got them all. I need to make the content area a bit wider though. The older images along side the Google Adsense forces the content text into too narrow of a space. The lists in the footer got fixed as well as well as the Next and Previous Page links found at the bottom of most pages. I also changed the permalinks to be the actual title of the content instead of being a separate link. Have to admit that I found that rather silly, like how Movable Type does their comment links.
- ShareThis is now found on every Post page. I had tried it previously on a few, not to much success, but I desided on rolling it out anyway.
- I've turned on gzip on a trial basis. I know that the webpages served are rather large, almost as large as some WordPress blogs I've seen. I've noticed a drop in the bandwidth used so hopefully that's an improvement. If you have any issues, please let me know.
- I've reduced the number of posts found on each page from 10 down to 6. Again, the size of the page served was a factor to this but also too much information was being displayed that made it a bit confusing for folks. At least that's how I felt.
- Related to that, the category, monthly and daily pages now only show an excerpt of each post, similar to WordPress' the_excerpt() function. Wish I could leave images in there but I'm not going through the code to fix that.
- I've installed a Related Entries script. Hopefully you'll see it right after the content on some Posts. Unfortunately this means I have to go back through and retag every single Post here so it may take a bit for folks to see it. If you really want to see it in action, the posts I've written about Apple and the iPhone is where I tested it.
- Oh, I'm just sigh of 1,400 posts so I updated the tag in the header. Comments stand at about 460 in case you're interested.
- I've made room for a list of Favorite Posts in the footer. Haven't listed any since after adding that bit in there, I started to give some thought about also putting in a tag cloud down there as well. Something for the next round of fixes I guess.
- The Category and Monthly pages now have Page Counts in their titles. I did that since Google was complaining about similar titles on many of my pages. That took some fixing of the Paged Archives plugin I installed previously.
- I fixed a number of 404s and broken links. Hopefully this will be less of an issue for folks. I still have a list that I need to go through some time soon.
- Oh, and I've also installed iMT, a Movable Type plugin that allows me to Post from my iPod Touch. Doesn't allow for more categories than a single one and it won't allow me to include any photos but it's there in case I need it.
Leave a comment
Please feel free to leave a comment. Please note that we do have a comment policy and we do ask that you respect it.