Having spent a lot of the weekend sorting out the styles and templates for the blog, I think it's about time to get back to work; i.e., the PhD.
However. before I abandon this 'diversion' I thought I'd make a few notes about what still might need to be done on the site:
- The main page of the blog just lists the ten, or so, most recent posts. At the bottom of the page there is a link to the site's archives. I wonder if I need something upfront, such as a search box, to allow people to find old material more easily.
- I've done away entirely with the sidebar. That gives the page a cleaner look, but it doesn't invite people to explore more of the site.
- Finally, I've started using the hierarchical categories. I had planned to do this earlier. But, having now installed the latest version of the software, it's been so easy to do. Now I'm wondering if I should use tags as well as categories.
I'm amazed at my capacity to get distracted by something. Such as fixing these templates and styles. I could easily spend much more time doing this. But at the end of the day, I wouldn't be moving forwards on what is really important; my teaching and my research.
Actually, it has taken me less time than I expected to do the changes I needed wanted to make. That's all down to Google's new web browser Chrome. It's a slick and tidy piece of software. I would make it my main browser except that it doesn't (yet) support ad blocking, and two essential Firefox add-ins ( Zotero and libx) aren't available for it (Oh, and it isn't yet available for FreeBSD).
Anyway, Chrome has this really neat feature that allows you to inspect elements of a web page to see which parts of your stylesheet are 'active'. Without this, I would have spent a lot more time tweaking the site's CSS.
And now, back to the salt mine.
Update
Andrew pointed me towards CSSViewer. This neat add-on for Firefox shows what the CSS is for a particular element on the screen. Google's Chrome inspector shows which parts of the style sheet is being used (or overridden) so it is easier to tweak one's style sheet.
