I’ve reorganized the room34.com home page yet again. If you’re looking at this page and the layout looks totally hosed, you either: a) need to clear your cache, or b) are using Internet Explorer 6.
I still need to test the site in Windows, so maybe there are some other “legitimate” errors on my part, and ultimately I do try to make the site look right in IE6 these days, but… well… that’s all. I’ll be testing the site in Windows within the next day or two and adjusting as needed.
Enjoy!
Last week I was excited by the prospect of increased traffic here when I discovered that a New York Times blog had linked to a 2-year-old post on this site.
I eagerly watched my hit count go up. The post received over 500 hits in the 5 hours immediately following the appearance of the NYT link. But wow, did the traffic drop off fast. I’m still getting a trickle of hits on that 2-year-old post each day, but my overall site traffic is back down to pre-NYT levels. Here’s a chart of hits on my site over the past month. Can you tell when the NYT link appeared?
For what it’s worth, I think the earlier jump in activity from late October occurred because that was right around the time I worked with my hosting provider to reinstate some third-level domains (such as coltrane.room34.com) for links to subsections of my site. I had used these third-level domains several years ago but they had been “turned off” for at least 3 or 4 years. I can only assume from the increase in traffic that there are still sites out there that have been linking to these URLs for all of that time, even though they didn’t work.
I’ve just posted an updated version of the website for The Farm documentaries, now featuring both films streaming online in their entirety. Check it out! room34.com/thefarm
I’ve just set up a brand new page of RSS feeds. Now you have a choice of not just the plain vanilla (no, make that a “kamikaze” Mr. Misty* from Dairy Queen) feed with everything in it, but a separate feed for every category of Blather in the known universe (if the extent of the “known universe” is this website).
*I’m no longer the Dairy Queen aficionado I was in my youth, but there’s one a few blocks from my house and we occasionally take the kids there in the summer. I’ve noticed this strange thing lately on the menu called “Arctic Rush.” Never having been a Mr. Misty fan myself, I didn’t notice it had disappeared from the menu, and apparently it has just been renamed. Personally I think “Arctic Rush” sounds lame… something an inferior competitor would come with. Burger King, perhaps, or McDonalds. Except then it would be the “Arctic McRush with Cheese” or something.
On my Tools page, I tout my use of jQuery, which is true (I do use it), but up to now I wasn’t actually using it on my own site. Like the unkempt barber, I was always too busy cutting everyone else’s hair and not my own. And by hair I mean websites. And by cutting I mean building. So, sort of the opposite of cutting. But (as usual) I digress.
Before, the Web 2.0-ish, AJAX-ified, buzzword*-izationalized features of my site were kind of a hodgepodge of built-in WordPress features, homebrewed JavaScript and partially-implemented and or modified plug-ins.
Now I’m trying to streamline and consolidate it all on jQuery and, when applicable, jQuery-based WordPress plugins, dropping the last vestiges of Scriptaculous and prototype.js (oh how they’ve served me well). To that end, I’ve changed my navigation menus from my own quick-and-dirty style to something jQuery-based and unnecessarily showy. (I may drop the sliding animation once it starts to annoy me, which will be in about 14 minutes.)
I’ve also finally addressed my annoyance with the less-than-amazing new gallery feature in WordPress 2.5. Granted, it’s way better than what I was using before, but I really don’t like how clicking a thumbnail loads another blog page that just contains the larger version of the photo, with the photo’s filename as the title. Yuck. But I found a nice jQuery-based lightbox plug-in that does exactly what I wanted. Now anywhere on my site where I’ve got a link directly to an image, that image loads in a lightbox layer instead of redirecting to another page or just a blank window. (And I didn’t even have to add a bunch of rel="lightbox" attributes to my old code like before! [And even better, I didn’t have to take out the ones I had already added!!!!])
So… well, you are either a web designer/developer, in which case you are ever-so-slightly interested, or you’re not, and you’re not. But I am, and I am, and I am very pleased with the results so far!
And the last thing I have to say is, given my inclination to talk in circles tonight solely to amuse myself, it’s probably a good idea that I decided to spend the evening tinkering with my own site rather than working on a client’s project!
* I just love how the page I linked to notes that “This page may not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.xx.” Only on a page whose URL contains both .edu and a tilde. I just installed Multiple IE in my new copy of Windows last night, so maybe I should fire up IE 3.1 and see if he’s right.
