Home : News : Content and Cosmetic Improvements
Quite a lot has been improved this time:
- Content
- Some small updates and corrections
- Much improved project section
- A new article
- Some cosmetic improvements
- Technical improvements
Still plenty of work to do:
Updates this time
Content
The content of the site has had a bit of attention lately (from me anyway!):
Updates and Corrections
I've updated the About RADO section with some new content, including some corrections to the roles occupied by my machines. The Wishlist has also been updated.
Improved Project Section
FTPull has been promoted to the top of the list - much as I'm more excited about some other projects, this is definitely the most worthwhile one from the outside, in terms of the availability of actually usable software. New projects OpenOEE and Plink now feature, and the section on Argen has been updated to actually include some downloads.
New Article
There's a short and hopefully funny new article in the Articles section: Why Does Google Hate Your Browser?
Cosmetic Improvements
As well as content updates and behind-the-scenes improvements to the scripts I use to maintain the site, there have been some cosmetic updates.
Improved home page
The home page now has the top 5 news articles included on it and is (hopefully) a bit less old-fashioned.
Corner Radius
There is no longer any risk of cutting yourself on the corners of the grey CSS blocks. I'm using CSS3's corner-radius for this, with a nod to -moz-corner-radius and -webkit-corner-radius so that this will actually work with some present day browsers. This won't work with MSIE, but if you're still using that old crate, please get upgrade. I refuse to work around its continued uselessness; MS have had over a decade to produce something that works and are just not keeping up.
Geeky Buttons
Apropos getting Firefox, I have added some geeky fanboy buttons under the menu on the left. I think the overall geek cred is +1; +10 for Debian, -12 for Ubuntu, +3 for Firefox. I like all three of these though so I'm happy to take the hit for Ubuntu. :)
Technical Improvements
I've been tinkering with the tdoc stuff since adding it, and it now applies in more places. Rather than needing to be of object type tdoc to get its handy preprocessing, I can apply it to other object types in the Argen sources of this site instead. So far I've updated the news articles so that they use it; more may follow.
To Do
Still a fair bit of work to do before I'm happy with the site:
Contact system
There's still no easy way to get in touch with me through the site. This should be sorted for the next update; it's really too easy to procrastinate over this but it's a genuinely really useful feature and I don't like being without it.
Article comments
Radicalabacus.org will (hopefully) finally drag itself into the world of Web 2.0 (properly; StumbleUpon buttons on the articles don't count) with user comments on the articles soon - possibly for the next update. Argen doesn't exactly make this easy (it was originally built in 2005) but I'm not ready to move away from it so I'll build this such that it will graft onto the existing system for now.
Project improvements
Project pages could use some structural and content improvements still - bug reporting functionality would be nice, and I'd like to integrate the project pages with my Subversion repo if possible.
Creation times
The last modified times on the pages are all well and good, but for some things, a creation time would be nice as well. This is a little trickier to achieve with Argen but I'm working on it.
Search feature
There's not enough content to really warrant a search feature yet but I want to build it before browsing around becomes too irritating. It's not likely to arrive with the next update, but maybe the one after that.