I’ll return to blogging later this week, after I collect some material worth writing about. This week holds a Mac User’s Group meeting and Benjamin’s ear surgery, the successful completion of which will kick us into packing-the-house mode, so there should shortly be some stories worth telling.
Meanwhile, now that the site has survived its second big rush of visitors (over 14,000 unique hits in 3 days!) in the space of a year, I figured it was time to do a little bit of work I’d been thinking about.
I’ve been wanting to make better use of the sidebar, since I can’t find a 3 column layout that isn’t ugly, so I wrote a menu system to move the site navigation up to the top. It’s not perfect yet, but I’ve been staring at it for so long that I can’t think about it objectively any more. It uses pretty clean CSS/DHTML, so it should work mostly consistently in most browsers. It’s been a long time since I did any pure web development, so I might be a little rusty. And for the life of me, I can’t make myself switch away from using Tables for this kind of stuff… Anyway, if you can think of some way to make it better/more attractive, let me know.
I’ve also now almost completely changed the Flickr Sidebar Widget from its original code, having changed the layout and appearance so many times. The modified source code is available if anyone’s interested.
Update: Click one of the images in the Flickr feed on the right. Wait’ll you see what happens!
And finally (at least for now) I’ve added a Widget to show the 10 most popular posts on the site at any given time. While things are quiet around here, feel free to poke through them. I’m not entirely sure how the algorithm works, but its some math based roughly on number of comments and number of direct visits to a given post.
I’m also toying with a collaborative project I’d like to try out, based on this clever new way that literature is being produced in Japan. I’ve started tinkering with the idea via a Wiki, but it likely won’t make it onto the site until after the move. I’m starting to realise how much I love writing, and how powerful a little bit of prose can be, given the right audience. So I’ve been thinking about how to explore that further…
Anyway, traffic has been consistently higher since the Slashdotting, which means there a couple new readers. Thanks for sticking around after the storm, we’ll do our best to keep some interesting content coming again real soon!
Until then, here are a couple of the blogs that contributed to the traffic. Some of them are pretty good:
– Fei’s Engineering Blog
– Anything With Wheels
– PC, Music and Games: A Nerd’s Paradise
– SethCrotchett.com
– tdrapeau.com
– Life Is Rich
– Musings on an Assortment of Subjects
And here’s someone else who thinks Programming is Poetry…