Site Update Aug 2012

Published: {ts '2012-08-21 00:00:00'}
Author: Steven Neiland
Site Url: http://www.neiland.net/article/site-update-aug-2012/

No tech post this week folks. Instead I'm rolling out some updates to the site. Most of these a pretty minor on the front end but every little helps. Here is a quick list of whats new.

Home Page And Navigation Updated

The recent articles section has been given a makeover with more meta data and direct links to the comments section.

Fixed the navigation so that it shows the currently selected section.

Blog Index

The blog index has been updated to include a jQuery powered load-more feature. I considered making this function automatic when you reached the bottom of the current list but my site makes use of a footer. Also I find sites that scroll infinitely annoying.

Articles And Social Buttons

The biggest changes are in the article page. I have dropped the "Digg" and "Reddit" buttons as I don't use those sites myself and I didn't see any traffic coming from them.

In their place I have made it easier to share an article by creating email and print buttons. Clicking the email button opens your default email client and auto fills in the subject line and the body with the article description and a bit.ly hyperlink

I'm particularly happy with the print function as it embeds a QRCode in the output so that anyone who see's a printed version of a posting can quickly scan it with a smartphone and get to my site.

More To Come

I've also tweaked a lot of minor things that will probably go unnoticed. I say this as I've probably forgotten half of them myself. Obviously I've also added a lot more behind the scenes to make my own life easier. More importantly though I have added a lot of stub code for new features in the next release.

If in the mean time you have any feature suggestions please leave a comment below as I'm always looking around for good ideas. Hope you like the new look, thanks.

Things I'm Currently Considering For The Next Release