This past week has been a time for tweaking the HTML on many aspects of both this blog and the new group blog, Transitional Justice Forum.
You’ll see I’ve changed a couple of things on the sidebar here, which I do from time to time. One of the most useful things I did on JWN, though, was to make the “Topics” index much more useful. Instead of coming up with an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y lengthy fulltext version of all the posts that I’ve filed under each particular category, it now comes up with just a listing, with each item followed by the standard RSS-style excerpt of the post in question.
If you haven’t used the “Topics” index before, you’ll find it down near the bottom of the right sidebar.
So do we still need the sidebar’s listing of ‘JWN Golden Oldies’, I wonder? I haven’t actually added anything to it since the end of 2003… the items on it are become more olden-and-golden with every month that passes. It was kind of a pain to pull it together month by month, back when I was doing it. Maybe I should just let the Topics listing and the MT Search capability do their job and forget the Golden Oldies. (Or I could put their listing into a simple link-to file rather than having them all right there on the sidebar.)
Could the site use a second sidebar, I wonder?
More on Topics’, aka ‘Categories’… I see this MT3.2 that I now have allows for sub-categories as well as main categories… I had tried for something of the same effect recently when I decided to add date-based listings to the main “Iraq” category, which had become completely unwieldy… But it’s not nearly as unwieldy now that I have the excerpt-only delivery system. So I’ve got a couple of different options with “Iraq” now, that I need to sort out… Also, since the Categories (Topics) now do look so much more useful than hitherto, I should go through the whole JWN archive and try to make sure the categories (including multiple categories) are appropriately assigned and indeed appropriately chosen… Sounds like more fairly detailed work… for someone…
Anyway, now that I’m thinking about all this stuff, do send in your comments, reactions, and suggestions re the design of the site. And if you’d like to help with checking out the Category assignations for the archive, or have some good ideas ideas about the present choice of items under Categories, please let me know about that, as well.