Home | About | Contact

A few More Updates

---

I told you that I would actively trying to get this site into shape, and I'm here to prove to you that I could get more working. So here are some highlights of what I did yesterday to improve the site.

RSS Feeds

You'll notice now on the right hand side of the page there is an RSS link. Go ahead and click that, and depending on what browser your using you'll subscribe yourself to my feed. I might actually change this in the future to be managed by feedburner, but right now I can handle it myself.

Better Navigation

I've added some navigation to the top of the page, so that you can at least get back to the main index. I've added links to the main index page and my About page and Contact page. In doing so I needed to add flatpages support to the site, which I'll go over in another post, but lets just say I have my own CMS managing this content.

Functional Search

The search capability is now fully functioning and returning the results I would expect. I think I'll change this around to return the order of the search results by the number of views that a particular post may have received. That way I'll get back what might turn out to be the most relevant of the results. My assumption is that people will be searching for the things that others also found the most interesting, so I'll make it easier for them by returning the most popular.

Tagging

If you were to do a search, at the bottom of the results for each post, you will see a section that lists the tags associated with a particular post. I've implemented tagging on the site so that I can relate multiple posts to each other. I also hope to integrate this with technorati, so that I can start gaining more traffic. Right now tags are just meant for this site only, but in the future they may integrate with other sites, we'll see. That's about all the updates I had time for yesterday, which was a lot of work considering I had to create templates for each of them and tried to keep the code to a minimum. Luckily it's the last time I'll need to change them until I'm ready to do a redesign, working with templates is great. Moving forward I need to add tagging to each of the posts on the posts_detail.html template. Right now the only place you see tags are in the search results. I'd like to add that to each of the individual posts. I also need to spruce up the tagged results page a bit as well. Right now when you click on a tag you just get a bunch of titles associated with the tag, that isn't going to cut it, I need to add some more data there. I also noticed that my category links are broken in the sidebar. The categories are right, but the links to them are broken, meaning I don't have anything setup in my url config to handle the category listings. So that's something else that needs to be fixed. As you can imagine, check back tomorrow and the site should be even more impressive than it is today.

Current Projects

In Production