newstalk

newstalk

:: like newspeak, minus the ungood bits. ::

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« Where angels fear not.
Office humor. »

Never settle.

Lately I’ve become less than satisfied with newstalk in its current incarnation. Especially the sidebar—I don’t like the sidebar. Do you like the sidebar? I don’t. There are other things, but perhaps I should just list out some of the changes I want to see made:

The Three Legged Stool of Style:

XHTML. HTML 4.01 is, like, so totally 20th century, dude. And some day there will be cool things I can do with XML. Just maybe not quite yet.

CSS. I have not yet begun to capture the possibilities of Cascading Style Sheets. The sidebar is done with CSS. The sidebar bites. I can do better than that.

Accessibility. In my initial design of this site, I cut corners and kludged up solutions so that the site would work. Yes it validates, but it’s not always pretty under the hood, and not necessarily as accessible as it could be. See my earlier rant for some more of the ideas behind this.

Other cool things: * Purple Number notation. Yes, it’s as cool as it sounds. The web could really use granular addressability. This is a cool thing that we will be able to do Some Day with XML and XLink. But we can’t right now. Thus, Purple, and there’s a great plugin for MovableType (on which this blog is founded) to do exactly what I want. * WikiWiki Notation. The same great plugin that would give me Purple would also give me Wiki. While I still prefer the control of pure HTML over the simplicity of WikiFormat, I love the idea of automatic internal links within my site. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s okay. I probably don’t either. * Doing more with MovableType. I’ve always taken pleasure in making a tool do more than it was intended for. MovableType is a powerful little content management system, and I’d like to push the envelope a bit, see what I can do. I’m already using it to manage this site’s “about me” page. With a minimum of setup, I can have each section of the site as a blog of its own, with all sections sharing the same module files for shared content (like the footer of this page, or that accursed sidebar). Why not just manage the whole site that way and be done with it? Anything beats the download-via-ftp-edit-in-emacs-upload-via-ftp shuffle.

Those are a few ideas. You might begin to see some changes by the summertime. We’ll see how it goes.

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On February 12th, 2004, this was trivial (Tags: , , ) | | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed

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