website

One of my website pet peeves is the lack of attention to how a site behaves when printed. All too often, there’s either an assumption that we live in a truly online-only world, or simply a lack of thought about how any given page will look when printed. Consequently, there are a lot of websites that look like crud when printed: navigation links and ads all over the page taking up unnecessary space, content crammed into a narrow column, an extra half page of junk after the actual content ends, etc.

Some sites give a ‘print view’ link that produces a print-optimized version of the page, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people never see that — especially given the number of times I’ve had to actively hunt for such a link, and found it shoved off in some corner, not obviously tied to the content at all. Besides, having a specialized page seems like unnecessary overhead on the server when better solutions exist.

To that end — and this is a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a while (I never even got around to it with my last design) — I’ve resurrected the print stylesheet for my site. Admittedly, I have no idea how often people print something they find here (and I would guess that it’s not very often at all), but at least now I know that if they do, they’ll get something useful.

There’s an older, but still relevant, more detailed look at the techniques I use in this post from 2003, but here’s a rundown of the results:

1. No navigation links below the website title.
2. No sidebar at all.
3. No comment entry form.
4. No Google ads.
5. The content fills the page, with a wider left-hand margin to allow room for binding.
6. Rather than coloring links (useless on a printed page), the URLs display after the linked text, using Markdown style formatting.

The only issue I’m having is the same issue I had the first time I set up a print stylesheet: the code that inserts URLs after linked items borks up the clean display of inline images (for an example, try printing this post). I’m (still) stumped on how to exclude images from the link insertion code, though, so for now, I’m just going with what I’ve got.

For some time now I’ve been using the Postalicious WordPress plug-in to automatically create the link posts aggregating stuff that I toss into my delicous account. As I’ve been tweaking and fine-tuning the templates for the new version of the site, though, I (re-)discovered one minor annoyance.

I like to use post excerpts for my archive pages (more detail than simply listing the title, easier to skim through archives using the full body for every post), but Postalicious didn’t have a way to set an excerpt. Each Postalicious post would then end up with an autogenerated excerpt, which tend to trail away in the middle of the first link in the post, leaving something like this:

Links for January 15th through January 16th
Sometime between January 15th and January 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
no news is bad news: An expression of the value of local news, especially in Seattle, especially in these uncertain times. Cool Stuff: Olly Moss’s Poster Remakes: 21-year old UK artist Olly Moss is probably best known for his […]

It works, but it’s not pretty.

A couple days ago I dropped a line to Postalicious’ creator, asking it might be possible to add excerpt templates in a future revision. He wrote back to say that he’d work on that when he got a chance…and just one day later, version 2.6 of Postalicous was posted with support for excerpt templates!

Nicely done, and very quick response. I’m impressed! Postalicious is all updated, and from here on out, link posts shouldn’t look so cluttered in my archive pages. Now to see about tweaking the excerpts on all those earlier posts….

A new year is (almost) here, and along with that, it was time for a bit of a refresh to the design. It’s not a huge change — generally speaking, all the bits are in the same basic places — just a little fine-tuned and tweaked.

• I’ve switched the theme to a mostly-stock installation of Carrington, with just a few tweaks here and there to suit my tastes.
• Tweets are now a little more visually separated from each other and from longer posts, and are now linked back to the original entry on Twitter.
• I’ve been adding tags to my entries for a little while, but they’re just now starting to be exposed via the new sidebar. Most entries don’t have tags, but I’m slowly adding them as I go back to work with older posts…that’s going to be a long, slow process that I’m not devoting a whole lot of time to. New posts will be tagged as they appear.
• Google Adsense banners have been tweaked so that they’ll now appear underneath the first two non-Tweet posts on the main page. I’ve been trying to have some variation on that for a while (keeps them visible, but not super intrusive), but it’s been buggy. I think I’ve finally got it working properly.

And that about covers it.

I have no idea how I ended up on their radar, but I’ve just been rated an 8.3 on Blogged.com, some form of directory and rating site for weblogs.

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.3 score out of (10) in the Personal Blogs category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.3 score.

Well, nifty. Works for me! Guess this means I better actually keep doing something with this place, huh? ;)