Update 2: I now know that the problems I have been having today are related to this widespread problem caused by certain hosts that upgraded CPanel. Damn it. I wasted over seven hours trying to fix this error 500 problem that I thought I caused.
Update: Stuff is a little crazy on the site. Expect a few broken links. I’m trying to fix things and debating whether to go all the way and do the PHP dynamic publishing thing.
Look out for falling tags. I’m not motivated enough to do a complete site redesign right now, but I felt a strong urge to add a few improvements.
First, the archive menus in the right sidebar are no longer jump menus. Jump menus have long been the bane of usability and accessibility experts, but they are a common technique in most of the MT tutorials. Now the monthly archive and category archive links are unordered lists, and I’m using the power of Javascript and the DOM to do an expand/collapse link. If Javascript is disabled, they remain expanded.
To compensate for my garrulous nature, I’ll probably do something similar with entries on the main page and the “Continue reading…” extended entry link so that it doesn’t take you off to the individual entry archive page (as the link below does now).
I added an Acronym plug-in to automatically add the acronym and title tags to common acronyms. This works in entries and comments.
I also made a few improvements to comments. If you mouse over the comment excerpts in the main page sidebar, you can see the full text of each comment via a tooltip without having to go to that entry page. Eventually, I suppose, I’ll upgrade this to use a hovering div that retains formatting. Also, the excerpts no longer chop off the end of the last word.
On the individual archive pages themselves, there are a few random cosmetic improvements. Also, my comments now stand out a bit more (because I’m special).
The favicons thing looks neat, but I am a bit torn over how the the MT Favicon plug-in handles them. Ideally, they would locally cache the favicons instead of always running off to the commenter’s server to get the image. In a small way, this is bandwidth theft (hot-linking of images). Hmmm.
I also added a bunch of QuickTags buttons above the comment textarea field. Just click the buttons to quickly add HTML tags to your comments (just don’t don’t forget to click the closing button). One bug that I have noticed so far—in Safari the cursor gets inserted before the tag when you click a tag button.
I implemented a live preview for comments powered by Javascript. It even simulates simple Markdown and Smarty Pants rendering.
Finally, I’ll be posting the very last of the Hawai‘i entries in the next day or so.
