I said it would be back, and it is. I’ve brought back my Monsters from the Id title graphic. In that previous post I said I wouldn’t bring it back until “all the bells and whistles” were in place. Well, as anyone who does their own website probably knows, all the bells and whistles will never be in place. But I did do some major upgrades.
First you will notice that the “My Links” section is gone and replace with “Navigate” at the top of my Sidebar. “My Links” has now moved into the brand-spankin’ new About page that you can access from said “Navigate” section.
I’ve also redesigned how my Archives work. I took the references to the monthly and category archives out of my Sidebar and put everything under a master Archives page. I’ve changed my monthly archives and category archives to only show the 40 word excerpt of each post. You can click the link for the full post. The main reason for this is that pages were getting too big. I’ve only been running this site a few months. But 50+ posts in my “Musings” category where I tend to get a little long-winded, made a huge page to load. What would it be like in a year? So all the data is still there, it’s just not duplicated on many different pages. Those you coming in looking for a specific item that you searched for on Google or another engine, can simply type in what you’re looking for into my search box and you should get the same thing.
I also added in the Referrers page that I talked about in my previous post. Less then 24 hours after putting it in, I had to make some major changes to it. For one thing I wasn’t stopping the bot spam that I first got. Vibehosting.com is now on my nemesis list. I had to implement both the BotWhack and IPWhack from this page. Even though I talked about how cool it was that it could track all pages at my website, I decided to shutdown referral tracking on “The Donnas — Rock ‘n’ Roll Machines” and “Right Turn Clyde”. Neither of those sites have been updated in about 4 years, but since they’ve been around that long, there are links to them from everywhere. They get much more traffic than this little weblog. I might setup a separate referrer tracker for them at some point but for now, I’m really just interested in Monsters from the Id.
I setup a very cool link list system using a second weblog and PHP. It’s based on a couple different methods that other’s have used with a few little changes of my own. I’ll write about the specifics at some point so others can make use of it. The long and short of this is basically no different for the end user. It just makes things much easier for me to add and delete links in my “Your Blogs” list and my “Favorite Sites” list. Plus I new and slightly more dynamically exciting list should be showing up in the not too distant future.
And what would any site be without smilies. I had to do. I’ve mentioned before—I can’t remember if it was in a comment on this site or someone else’s—that I try not to use them too much. I try to write in a clear manner so that my tone in inferred through my words. But obviously that’s not always possible. So the occasional smiley might be called for. Plus I turned them on for Comments. That’s more of a “stop in and have fun” area. People should be able to make cute faces. This too I did slightly different from the way that’s mentioned on other sites. I’ll post something on that as well.
But wait! There’s more! I enabled Markdown and Smarty Pants in the comments. That’s right folks! Now you too can benefit from the easy markup that is Markdown.
So enjoy all the new fun. I do have a few other tricks floating around in the back of my mind that might just pop up here one day.