Another round of updates has been completed. There is some new features, but mostly small changes and bug fixes. Most of the time has gone into a new admin dashboard that I'm very happy with.

When I release a new version it is inevitable that some minor things will be tweaked in the following week, but making large changes can be dangerous, so I always recommend using a mirror of the site for experimentation and development. This brings other problems, such as making small changes, that you forget to make in both versions, and you now have differences between the two. To solve this one must say: no more development, until the new version is ready. This is what I usually do.

Three weeks ago I made a copy of the site as it was, and only worked on the mirror code. This way I never introduce any errors to the site that you visit, and I can release a whole bunch of updates at once. At the bottom of this post is the change-log that I've written the last month, and crossed out items as I've done them.

What's happened?

My favorite feature on web sites I often visit is a 'What has happened since the last time I visited' function. This is why I took it a step further on this site with the News page. In there you quickly get an overview of recent happenings, both on my page and some other interesting links. Now I've updated it to include peoples comments on my blog. The thought is that if someone posts a comment on an old post, not many would see it. But now, the News page will show it.

The Photo gallery has gotten some minor tweaks: changed the drop-down menu slightly, and added a feature which tells you which posts the photos belong in, if any. Just hover the mouse over the link, and a dashed frame will show which photo belongs.

The About section has been updated with a contact form. It simply sends me an email, but it can be useful.

The blog has (as usual) received the most attention. To start us of, I've again changed the font. The site has been through four different fonts now.

First there were the old Times new Roman.
Then I changed to the boring (but safe) Arial.
Then I tried Georgia (while testing).
And finally: Welcome to Cambria

I'm hoping to stick with Cambria for a while. I think it looks good, even at lower resolutions. What do you think? To the right is a small poll, where you can choose which font you think looks best. If you have a favorite font you would like to show me, please enter it into the other field.

After reading a little about typographyRobert Bringhurst - The Elements of Typographic Style I've tried to make minor adjustments to make everything look a little better. Changing the font-size a little, the padding, line height, weight, etc. I hope that the overall impression will be pleasing. The problem with web pages, as opposed to books, is that everyone will see it differently, depending on operating system, browser and screen size. This makes it very difficult.

I've thought about how visitors read the page; after reading an article, where do I want you to go? My statistics show that half of you will exit the site after reading the article you entered on. The problem is of course, that when reaching the end of an article, there is nothing else to do. So I've added a footer to the page. This is probably the largest change I've done, but I think it can be important. The footer has three sections, as you can see in the image below.

Scroll down to see this pages footer.

To the left is some information about the current post, and a short introduction from myself. To the right are some other posts you might be interested in. In the top middle you can move to the next and previous post. Lastly, the main middle will change. At the moment there is only Twitter, but later I hope to include random new photos, interesting pages, etc.

Underneath the menu I've added some icons. There is a search, mail, RSS and Twitter symbol. The search is a Google Custom search, that will search my blog posts. The mail takes you to the contact form. I'm not a very active user of Twitter, but if you want to add me, feel free to do so.

Most of the time has gone into the administration system. I will not go into details here, but it has gotten a lot more advanced. This is also the only part I can easily continue to develop, since I'm the only one using it.

I've changed the way images show in a post. Earlier there was a frame, and an ugly caption. Now, the caption shows when you hover over it. Clicking an image will enlarge it like before.

The rest of this post is the change-log I wrote when starting this update.

Syntax:
Of special interest to the visitors
Not to be included
Finished

News

• Rewrite code - the current code is obviously slow, must rewrite.
• Redesign - change design to emphasis important news.
• Comments - new comments should appear in the news, this way it is easy to see if there has been any new comments.

Blog

• New font - Minion, Georgia, Cambria?
• Font - change line height, font size
• Small-caps problem - small-caps characters act weird in some versions of Opera.
• Further reading - at the end of a post the user should get some choices of further reading, such as newer or similar posts, other sites, etc.
• Meta description - each post should have an individual meta description.
• Favicon url - the url to the favicon is wrong.
• Template - a template would make it much easier to make changes.
• Drop-quotes - the quote sign should be dropped so that the text will be aligned.
• Search - make a search page with custom google search engine that allows for searching the blog posts.
• Quick icons - small icons that goes to search, contact by email, twitter, rss, etc.
• Short summary - the shortpostsummary should be as long as the div.
• Next/previous page - quick navigation to newer / older pages.
• Gravatar position - Looks weird right now, white frame?
• Comment text size - Too small at the moment
• Image caption - Remove frame, caption. Slide in / fade effect with transparency.

Photos

• Information - when holding the mouse over the photo, the title should state title and date.
• Hide/show - Use cookies to remember.
• Change the menu - Sort by, and archive above the fold

About

• Contact form - the user should be able to easily send an email to me.

Admin

• Possibility of the following:
Add feeds - a simple way to add feeds to the list of available feeds on the news-page
• Add photos - register photos from flickr, and select whether they should be published now, or not.
• Add categories - add categories to the database.
• Redesign panel - Must be useful on a mobile device
• Tasks - a new system that can publish posts, and update fields at a certain time.
• Checking - when a user visits the tasks are checked, and performed if necessary. This must happen before anything else.
• Publishing - any post set to publish at a certain time will be published, any photo associated with it will also publish. RSS will be updated.
• Clean log - can run at certain times, instead of every time
• Writer - the actual text tool that I write the posts in.
• Publish - there is a problem with some characters when publishing
• Typeset - all the rules for typesetting must be defined
• Integrate with tasks - a post should give orders to the tasks system, such as 'publish these photos when I publish this post', and 'update RSS'.

Misc

• Restructure - the function files desperately needs to be cleaned up
• IP-address ban - no IP-addresses associated with spam-bots should be allowed to post comments
• Improve visitor counter - Should not count my own visits.
• Google Analytics - Start using google analytics
• Update old posts - any posts that does not follow new standards should be updated.
• Validate - always validate everything before release.