Spacedmonkey

Lots of change in the design of the last couple of days. Researching on the internet, I found an Xhtml validation site called validator.w3.org. I found that my site was horriblely invalid from the analysised and comparing to the XHTML specifaction. So while I was in the mood to get rid of all the errors, I thought I would make some improvement lots of things on the site that was bothering me.

No more left hand pannel

The left hand pannel is completely been removed. The new right hand pannel, is a mix of the old right and left pannels. There are less links to other posts, but it means that the page is much less busy. What is displayed on the right pannel depends on what page you are on. This new design means that there is now space on the page for the posts to be displayed.

Search plugin

The old search plug-in used to use a google site search to look up your keyword. In the last week, google decided to add to it’s index, lots of links to addresses on the old design, V2. Even through, even if you go to these pages, you can taken to the address of where it is on the new page. This index problem, means that the search plugin as it was, was not good enough. So the new plug-in, uses the in-site search (see top right). It means that only the posts can be searched through and not the other pages and subdomains, the largest percent of this site’s content is in the form of posts.

Categories change around

The set of categories are arranged has changed. The sub-category updates has now become a category in it’s own right. Images was down-graded to a sub-category of stuff. I will try to redirect the old addresses to the new to stop any problems.

Can you digg it

Digg has become one of the biggest and most popular linking site on the internet at the moment. It was time that Spacedmonkey supported digg. So at the bottom of every post, there is a link that automatically adds that post to digg. Hope you find this useful.

Trackback

A TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping”; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. The new design has a easily to see and copy trackback address assigned to each post. These allows me and others user to use this address to link to each post.

Navigation bar reordered

The top navigation bar has be changed, the order of the items has changed. Also the broken links are now fixed.

Longer post titles

On the old left hand sidebar there was a list of the 10 most recent posts. Becuase of the way that the sidebar was formatted, It meant the post with titles more than 15 characters, mess up the list on the side of the page. Now the post’s title can be as long a I want.

RSS feed changes

Made some changes a while to the feed. As I have said to before, the computingcorner feed to no longer being updated, so please remove it from the feed reader. The most important change in the feed is that for longer posts, I add a “read more” link, splitting the post in two. It means that items in the feed are not extremly long. I also fixed an error, that means it displays better in Internet Explorer 7 reader.

XHTML ERRORS

I have removed all but a few of the errors in the template, so it means that the page will load faster. There are still lots of errors within the posts themselves, so all the page will never really be valid. I made some changes in the way that post’s html is generated, so the new posts will hopefullly be valid. With over 80 posts already on the site, It will takes days to change all the posts to valid html. At some point, I will fix these post but I do not have that kind of time.

Final thoughts

The design is new, I am sure there is going to be a few problems, specially, things like the search plug-in. They may be some more changes coming, which I will post about when they happen. If you have any problems, please use the contact form or email me.