Change You Can Believe In?
Posted in OAImages News by John E. Pannell on June 10th, 2008 at 5:02 am No, this not about a political candidate. Instead I thought I’d write about some real change rather than sloganeering.
Since yesterday evening, the page layout of this blog has been changing. These changes were designed to shorten the length of the blog’s home page while increasing the amount of information easily accessible from it. I think I have suceeded.
The biggest changes are seen when you scroll down the page. So, take a few moments to look at the whole page, rather than just the post at the top.
The three column layout I have used since this blog’s earliest days remains intact for the most part. The side bars have been cleaned up and shortened. The categories section on the right side bar has been converted to a drop down menu, rather than displaying a long list of the categories used in this blog.
The tag cloud in the left sidebar has been eliminated. This feature wasn’t used much. I also don’t think it was understood.
The number of posts displayed in the middle column has been reduced from twelve to three. Experience shows that very few folks would scroll past the third or fourth post. At the the same time, for those who use RSS readers, I increased the number of posts in the RSS feed to twenty.
The biggest change is the bottom part of this page. I now show the first page, that part before the “read more” tag, for the most recent post in each of several categories. I also display the title and a link for the second through fourth most recent posts for these same categories. These categories represent what I consider to be the core of this blog.
I also decided to add a similar section for posts written by this blog’s contributing authors. They are a small group of dedicated authors who share their knowledge here, covering issues and areas that I would not be able to address on my own. This makes sure their posts get greater exposure on this site.
This truly is change you can believe in. I hope you like it.
Two issues I note in the right-hand column.
(1) For both Archives and Categories, in both FireFox and IE, the left side of the combobox for “Select Month”/”Select Category” projects out over the edge of the light-blue background.
(2) In FireFox, but not in IE, there is a large (5-inch or so) blank space in the “Categories” box belwo the header and above the combobox.
It seems there is a problem with the Word Press widget that renders the categories list as a drop down menu. The folks on the Word Press support boards have not yet answered my question about, nor any of the other questions I have seen dealing with the same issue.
So, until I have an answer, I have gone back to the old method of showing all this blog’s categories