A lot of work over the past week, don't know where and why I allow myself these chunks of time - but the look was getting a little stale. Plus, I got the idea to position the AdSense better, and everything kinda cascaded from there ...

• 
  Header bar - reorg'd the top left stuff into a menu bar of sorts, making room to move AdSense up to top left on the blog pages.


• 
  Gave up on the old ksearch stuff, and just integrated Google search. Positioned search in header bar, like most e-commerce sites do.


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  Simplified the RSS links, assuming a bit more "knowledgable" reader


• 
  Added the ability to select multiple color schems; the "original" is 04, other new ones this year given better names


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  Cleaning up the CSS, a bit less comments, some hand optimization. I still wan to leave this as a maintainable, self documenting thing, so I am not maxing out the optimization.


• 
  Had to make matching changes in the Blogger template


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  Moved the site updates blog to be a link off of the site info page - I'm typically the only one to read this anyway

Just a bunch of little updates

Been a long time since I noted anything in this blog, because I haven't really changed the site much.

However, about 1 month ago, hooked in to the HiddenNetwork, and uncovered a bug / feature of their CSS / generated code. In the process of fixing that, found there were some issues with my "holy grail" 3-column design - cross browser stuff.

Fixed all of those, plus changed the position of the validator buttons, because some of the pages in here are actually a tad dodgy. I did fix up the home page, to make sure it validates.

Ooo, look, CSS titles

I saw Slashdot do this as they are converting to CSS - using FireFox, you can pick from alternate CSS files. Not that I have alternate CSS files, but this gives me good impetus to get moving on that ...

Long time no update

I'd noticed Blogger started putting some annoying spaces in the tops of my posts ... nice discussion thread here, which gave me the solution, very nice, all in my CSS ...

.post-body div {clear: none !important; }

... to take care of Blogger's apparent snafu. Also, I was having fun hacking away - some pretty nice extensions for Firefox out there (especially Web Developer, stunningly useful - check out Outline Block Level Elements and Edit CSS).

TagCloud

Saw this neat trick, so I added it to the blogtemplate - made a button out of it as well.

Fiddling with my Blogger template never seems to end

See also my latest thoughts post

• Does AdSense script position change what gets shown? let's find out ...
• There seems to be a certain magic to GIFs that I don't 100% understand, but I fixed up a pair of buttons (report magic and add to myyahoo) that were giving me trouble)
• A new little link under each post - who else is linking to this post?

Setting a key mark on the calendar

I use Feedburner to send out the RSS feeds for this site, and I made a configuration change today. Instead of sending full text in the feeds, now sending Summary only - first 200 characters for Updates (just to get a look/feel sense of things), and first 500 characters for my Thoughts blog.

Key reason - while my AdSense numbers are never worth writing home about, there is a definite trend down over past few months, while my traffic / page hits / feed hits going up. I also know that a relatively small number of folks are subscribing to the feeds, but I'm not about to put AdSense in my feeds, so might as well get folks from the feed readers to get over to the site and take a look.

Multiple look feel

A number of added links to the network list, plus changed the way that include works. Found a nice hack to allow automatic delicious bookmarking. Added amazon wish list.

See, like I said, not a lot - but I did post a lot this week.

A couple of little things

Cleaned up the header, added link to home - I am thinking about simplification, get rid of home link, just click on the "logo". Added hacker notes in About; found this cute little Flickr zeitgeist script I tossed into the networks page.

Title

Something simple yet elegant, I changed the header graphic to a CSS approach, with a nice mouseover. Got the idea from MandarinDesign, they have loads of good stuff.

Some projects

Now that I'm stuffingl links into del.ico.us,I'm also tagging all blog posts with TechnoratiTags; going back thru the posts of this year retroactively. Also having aton of fun working with Analog and ReportMagic to fiddle with my logs and get some interesting metrics out of them. Finally,hacked away at LinkedIn - I'm in there, but not too many folks that I know are in there, regardless of what they claim.

Resume, plus an IE/Mozilla Annoyance

Made a lot of updates to the resume / CV page; typical periodic updates, plus classed it up a bit, added the ability to download PDF copies. I toyed with some links to Google Maps, but the referer does not have enough control of the links yet ...

Also, addressed an annoyance with IE - it pays no attention to margins, padding for the <hr> tag. Struggled for a while, then just hacked a CSS substitute - it behaves nicely now.

I also addressed my remaining validation issues for CSS and HTML 4.01, although I am aware of a nagging issue with my blog content ...

Social Networks page and del.icio.us

This has been on my todo for a while, but the Technorati Tags capability has pushed me over the edge. I've added the Social Networks page, mostly to link into my del.icio.us account, and blogroll, but more to follow.

Yes, I know it doesn't validate

Most of my work on the site over the past few weeks has been in writing blog entries, but I did spend some time cleaning up some pages that are not passing the HTML 4.01 Strict validation test. There as CSS errors out there too, I know, I'll get to it.