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A brief note on the recent site changes
1 min read

A brief note on the recent site changes

As some of you have already noticed (probably only those that don’t use aggregators), I took the site back to two columns a few days ago, and as ridiculous as this sounds, when the transition was complete I felt somewhat ‘liberated.’ As I mentioned before, the single-column layout was simply too restrictive and allowed for practically no expansion.

Search is back

I’ve re-added search forms to the menu (you’ll find them on the archive index and all other archived pages). I’d been conflicted about search here for a long time and kind of hid the option from view (well, not really, I just didn’t advertise it much). I thought about setting up some AJAXified live searching, but it all feels a bit too crufty to me right now and I’m not convinced that beyond the ‘neat’ factor the concept offers anything over ‘vanilla’ searching.

As it stands now, the search uses the built-in WordPress functionality, hacked up a bit to exclude the linked-list post. Believe me, I’m fully aware that WP’s searching capabilities leave a lot to be desired, which is why when the results are returned (or when there are no results) I explain WP’s shortcomings and offer a Google form so that the reader can try a more complex search.

Sparklines

On the index page you’ll see a new heading in the menu titled, My output here over the last three months. This is basically just a Sparkline graph of my posting activity for the previous 90 days. It serves no real purpose and I’m not sure how long I’ll actually leave it up. 😛

That said, I’m still experimenting with these micro-graphs and have a few more ideas to flesh out, including extracting site hits from my Mint installation and pumping them through a Sparkline or two, but after having spent some time on that thought last night, I realized that it could take quite a while to implement, and, well, I’m kind of busy with that whole bar thing. If and when I get the whole thing coded up, I’ll be sure to package it as a WordPress plugin (or would it be a paneless Pepper? :).

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