website

From what I can tell, my site gets a fairly good score from Silktide, which appears to be a web development firm based out of England. Some of the areas I got marked down on aren’t a surprise at all (W3C validation, for instance, is failing miserably right now, something I need to pay attention to rather soon), but I did get a laugh out of the one section that I was rated as ‘Very Poor’:

Amount of text A page was found to contain a very large amount of text. Users very rarely choose to read large, continous blocks of text, and these pages require time to download and scroll through for relevant content. Recommendations: Break larger pages up into several smaller pages, and consider restructuring content to make navigating it easier.

Yeah…I get it. I talk a lot. This isn’t exactly news, especially if you’ve been following my site for any length of time. Good for a laugh, though.

Now to take a look at those validation errors and see if I can’t bump my score up above a 7.8…

(via A Crank’s Progress)

Update: With some work tweaking templates and a mix of simple fixes (some missing </div> tags) and not-quite-so-simple fixes (tracking down all the unescaped ampersands), I’ve managed to push my way up to an 8.3 rating. While I still rate a Very Poor for Amount of text, I’m now Good on Size of pages, Features, and Speed, and Excellent on Popularity ranking, Popularity on Google, British legal requirements, Use of fonts, Use of forms, Use of Flash, Use of frames, Table-based layout, Use of headings, Use of style-sheets, Use of Interactive Elements, No of links, No of images, Links to, Use of page titles, Refresh redirects, Basic HTML design, Use of advertising keywords, and Use of audio. Amusingly (and quite accurately, in my opinion) for many of those categories — Flash, tables, redirects, audio — it’s because I don’t use them that I got the ‘excellent’ rating.

I think that’s all I’m going to worry about.

“A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” by Darin, Bobby from the album Legendary Bobby Darin, The (2004, 3:02).

…but in this case, it’s a good thing.

I’ve been wanting to move away from the (slightly tweaked, but still) stock template included with Movable Type 3.2 for some time now, but just haven’t been able to find the time and energy to tackle the project.

Today I actually managed to find both at once, and here’s the result — the return of the “Blue Distressed” theme for my site. I’ve missed this one, and apparently, so have at least a few of my readers, from comments I’d gotten from time to time. The theme has been slightly tweaked from its last appearance on the site, but it’s still essentially the same: blue-grey colors, and a kilted me up in the corner.

Of course, that picture is quite out of date — I’ve got a bit over a year and a half’s worth of hair now — but fixing that will have to wait for a while yet. For now, I’m just happy to have this place looking a little more “me” than it has for the past few months.

As always, feel free to let me know if anything seems obviously buggy, or cries out for further tweaking…unless you use Internet Explorer. If you’re using IE, get out of the ’90’s and upgrade to a browser that works (unless, of course, job restrictions restrict you to IE…in which case, I pity you). ;)

“Hallowed Ground” by Erasure from the album Innocents, The (1988, 4:05).

I’ve done a bit of tweaking on the ads served up on the pages of my site. While I certainly have no intentions of becoming an adfarm — I’ve seen weblogs where it’s difficult to find the content in the midst of a sea of ads, and that’s the last thing I want to do with my site — I finally decided that I didn’t mind at least slightly increasing the possibilities of having a few pennies slide my way from time to time.

To that end:

Donations: Two methods of simply tossing money at me are now displayed towards the bottom of the sidebar, using Amazon’s Honor System paybox and a PayPal donate button. No, I don’t really expect these to generate much (if anything), but you never know…I’ve been surprised a time or two in the past.

Advertising: For some time now, I’ve had one Google AdSense box just below the first entry, and an iTunes ad box in the sidebar. To these, I’ve added an Amazon ad box and a second Google AdSense box in the sidebar. Clicks through the Google ads and purchases made after clicking through the Amazon and iTunes ads will send a few fractions of a penny my way.

Now, as I’ve said, I don’t want the ads to overwhelm the content, so for the most part, I’ve made them as unobtrusive as possible — only one Google ad box is visible “above the fold” (visible when the page is first loaded), and the other ads don’t show up until you’ve scrolled through four full screens. Advertising mavens would probably tell you I’m doing this all wrong, but for me, it seems a good balance between having the ads out there and not overwhelming my few visitors.

It’s worth a shot, at least.

It’s a good thing I subscribe to my own RSS feeds — the ‘full content’ feed and the ‘full content with comments’ feed have both been updated to include the new tag support. Sorry about the mass-refresh in your RSS readers if you get hit with it.

My blog is worth $105,004.44.
How much is your blog worth?

But the real question is…would I actually sell it if offered the money? Heh. On the one hand, that’s a lot of money — on the other hand, that’s my name.

Of course, it’s not going to happen, so I don’t think I really need to worry about it.

I’m working on setting up a print stylesheet for the site. I’ve got it about, oh, 98% done — done enough that I could leave it as-is, except that there’s one little thing that’s bothering me that so far, I’m not able to fix. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Because hyperlinks are essentially useless on the printed page, in the print stylesheet, I’m using CSS2 selectors as outlined in this A List Apart article to insert URLs after links in the text. This way, instead of links simply printing as colored and underlined text, the destination address of the link is printed out after the link text.

Here’s the code I’m using to accomplish this:

a:link, a:visited {
    text-decoration: none;
    }

.entry-body a[href]:before,
.entry-more a[href]:before,
.trackback-content a[href]:before,
.comment-content a[href]:before {
    content: " [";
    color: #000;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

.entry-body a[href]:after,
.entry-more a[href]:after,
.trackback-content a[href]:after,
.comment-content a[href]:after {
    content: " " attr(href) "] ";
    color: #000;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

So far, so good, it’s doing exactly what it should. Here’s a sample of what it looks like when printed from a browser that understands CSS2 declarations (that is, pretty much everything except IE):

However, I often insert images into my posts that are linked, either to larger versions as in the above screenshot, or to the Flickr pages for the original images. In that instance, I’d prefer that the target URLs not be inserted, as they are less relevant, and tend to muck up the final printed page in odd ways.

Example number one: the panoramic image that appears at the beginning of the Cal Anderson Park post from earlier today:

Example number two: the Flickr imagebar from the bottom of the same post. The web version shows five thumbnails side-by-side, but once the URLs are appended for the print version…

…only two of the thumbnails can even appear on the page.

Okay, sure, so these things aren’t exactly major disasters, but I’m just anal enough that I’d like to fix them. What I’d like to do, then, is figure out just what CSS code I’d need to use to exclude images from the code shown above.

Of course, I haven’t got a clue how to do this (obviously, or this post wouldn’t even exist). I’ve been poking at it all morning, and I’m stuck. Any ideas?

Anyone?

Bueller?

---

NOTE: Possible Safari Bug? In the original A List Apart article, the example code used a combination of a:link:after and a:visited:after to ensure that the links were inserted after all the links — if the code was only attached to a:link:after, then any links that the user had visited would not get the link appended when the page was printed.

While I was working on this, I started with that code. However, I was noticing an odd bug that was only appearing in Safari (at least, it wasn’t appearing in Firefox or Opera, the other browsers I have available to test with) — Safari would pick one URL of the URLs on that page and insert it after every link. In other words, if one link on the page pointed to www.example.com, then no matter how many other links were on the page, they would all display as www.example.com.

I wrote that off as something to worry about later, and kept fiddling around trying to get my images to do what I wanted. In the process, I skimmed over a more recent ALA article on print stylesheets and noticed that Eric Meyer had presented slightly different code: instead of combining a:link:after and a:visited:after, he simply wrote a[href]:after, and that took care of both instances. I swapped out my old code for the new, more concise version, and not only did it work as it should…but the repeating URL bug disappeared. Now, when printing from Safari, all the correct links print out just as they should.

Weird…but good to know.