I spent most of yesterday tweaking the site; twas the first in-depth technical work I’ve done since my recent illness! Among the minor updates was an improvement in the layout of the site navigation.
One major thing I did was to fix up my reverse order travel pages, the ones from Kansas in July and the recent November entries. Previously, the pages had been built and then frozen. This wasn’t good as the dynamic content such as the archive listing was no longer updated. To fix that I made the frozen content part (the actual blog entries) an include file and then created new index files that sourced the blog entries. Works rather well, as you can see here and here.
I also created a simple archives index page, to augment the archive navigation on the left side of the page. Now, when one gets to the bottom of a page, there is a link to the archive page, which lists both the category and date-based archives.
I also cleaned up various templates, updated some of my include modules and just performed general cleanup. I’ve been more diligent about things that break the main page’s ability to validate, so I’ve added back the valid 4.01 HTML banner.
Btw, I’m posting this using netnewswire, which I finally broke down and bought, having found the lite version useful, but lacking in some ways. I like the combined view available in the full product, and this weblog editor beats using the combo box entry area in the default MT setup! Haven’t had a chance to try the notepad feature yet, but it looks promising.