I’ve reworked my sidebar a bit, using buttons I found on Steal These Buttons, via this MeFi post. Hopefully it’s not too much — I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll find out after this post goes up.
website
Any posts more directly connected to the upkeep, maintenance, and backend fiddling around of my website/blog and whatever platforms it’s running on at any particular moment.
Navigation – left or right?
I breezed through a usability study comparing left- and right-justified site navigation this morning.
I had the standard left-justified navigation for a while, and at one point had a three column layout with sidebars on both sides of the page, but in one of my redesigns I decided to go with the current right-justified navigation, and plan on sticking with it.
My basic reasoning is that this layout emphasizes the content over the navigation. As English speakers read from left to right, the content area has dominance. It also (I think) makes it a little easier to track your position on a page when reading a long post. With left-justified navigation, when you reach the end of a line on a page and move your eyes back left, you need to account for whatever space is taken up by the navigation bar. Using a right-justified navigation scheme, you just let your eyes snap all the way to the left of the page, and no searching is necessary.
Now, these are my opinions only, and I’m not schooled in usability at all, so I could be completely off base with that, so take my reasoning with a grain of salt. It’s just my thinking on an admittedly not very important matter. ;)
(via WebWord)
'Recent Tunes' update
Utilizing the iTunes Music Store linking hint I found earlier, I’ve updated the ‘Recent Tunes’ section of my sidebar. Before each artist, track, and album listing you’ll now see icons for Amazon and the iTunes Music Store — clicking on those will perform a search on the respective service for whichever line you clicked on. Nifty!
Some of the Amazon links are being a bit tweaky, and I’m not sure why, though. Sometimes they work fine, other times they get passed through with ‘"’ on either end of the search term, which confuses Amazon. I don’t know where that’s coming from, either — I can’t find that entity in any of the code on my side of things.
All the iTunes links work fine, however. The only caveat there is that they’re still building their selection, so the majority of my music probably isn’t listed yet. All good things in time, however.
Linking to the iTunes Music Store
Excellent tip that I’m saving here for future use: how to create a website link that performs a search on the iTunes Music Store.
Link format (as a single line, broken here for clarity): itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?
Immediately following the ending ? are any of four search terms, or a global search term:
songTerm=(song title)artistTerm=(artist name)albumTerm=(album title)composerTerm=(composer name)term=(global, search all fields)
Use & between query items if you are using more than one of the first four (non-global) querys, and replace any whitespace with %20.
Example: building a link to search for U2:
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2
Example: building a link to search for U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’:
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/ advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2&albumTerm=the%20joshua%20tree
Redesigning
Redesign in progress.
This is a starting point, not an end point. Some things may look goofy at the moment — my most humble apologies. Comments, as always, are welcome.
Yet to come: color (not one of my strongpoints, but I’m not planning on sticking with pure black and white for too long), some graphics to spruce the place up a bit, and, oh, whatever else that might fall out of my head along the way.
Destinations
I’ve implemented a new mini-feature that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a few days.
It’s not uncommon for me to stumble across something on the ‘net that catches my eye, but that I don’t create a full entry for. Sometimes I want to come back to it with a full entry later, other times it’s just a “ooh, neat!” moment. In order to track these, there is a new sidebar section called “Destinations” — little one-line links. Sometimes I may come back to these for full posts, other times that may be all that appears. It’s worth experimenting with for a bit, at least.
Inspiration for this was derived in part from Jason Kottke‘s ‘Remaindered Links’ and Christine‘s ‘Cookie Crumbs’.
No more 404's
I just implemented a very nice little PHP script for my website that ties into my site search function — the end result being that my site no longer has a “404 File Not Found” error page!
In brief: if a visitor puts in a URL address that doesn’t exist, it gets shunted to my search script. If the script returns multiple hits, that listing is displayed, but if the script only returns one hit, the visitor is automatically forwarded to that page. Very slick.
As a bonus, it provides a convenient shortcut to searching my site — just put in whatever search terms you want after “http://www.djwudi.com/” and see what you get!
(script via Scriptygoddess)
Too…many…windows…
I’ve been told I need to stop posting so much information on my site, as the subsequent preponderance of tabs was threatening to take over one of my reader’s windows.
Not wanting to cause any undue stress to any of my five loyal readers, I should probably resolve that henceforth, I shall no longer blog about anything other than my pets, what I ate for lunch each day, and the annoying things that my co-workers did today.
Unfortunately, I don’t have pets, I tend to forget to eat lunch on a fairly regular basis, and now that I’ve moved to a new position at work, I’m not dealing with annoying co-workers on a regular basis.
So I’m afraid you’ll all just have to put up with the usual blather.
My humble apologies.
;)
Blogroll updated
I spent a little time tonight updating my blogroll (on the right, just underneath the WudiVisions icon) to more accurately reflect the sites that I check on a daily basis. It automatically sorts by how recently they’ve been updated, so the most recent bits will always be towards the top, with sites that have been updated within the last six hours bracketed by hyphens. Lots of new reading there — enjoy!
Random downtime fixed
At least, I hope it’s fixed.
I’ve had a recurring problem for a while now, where at seemingly random times, I’d lose my connection to the ‘net. It seems that this is some sort of odd problem with my Linksys router. Since I host this domain (and three others) off of one of my computers here in my apartment, I’ve had my LAN isolated behind the Linksys router (as seen in this diagram).
Unfortunately, for some reason, every so often when I’m browsing my own website from any machine on my LAN, the Linksys router will freeze up. Since it sat between my computers and the outside world, this effectively killed my network connection. I’d recently upgraded the firmware of the router to the latest version, hoping that it would fix the problem — unfortunately, that seemed rather to exacerbate the difficulties, where the Linksys proceeded to randomly freeze while browsing my website even if I was using a computer outside my LAN.
Needless to say, this is quite annoying. Especially on days like today, when it froze at five in the afternoon, and I wasn’t able to come home and restarted until after I got off work at 9pm.
However, my account with Speakeasy allows me two static IP addresses. I got ahold of them, got my second IP address configured, and rewired my network (here’s the new diagram) to take the Linksys out from between the webserver and the world.
Technically, this is a little less secure, as there is now a direct line between my webserver and the world, with no intervening firewall for protection, but OS X is fairly secure, and I’m willing to take that slight risk if it allows my sites to have better uptime. The Linksys does still protect the PC, however. Somehow I just can’t justify leaving a Windows box open to the world, even if I think I’ve got it locked down. So much for ‘trusted computing‘.