[2005] Site relaunch & implementation notes

Welcome to the relauched Outside of a Dog, now powered by Movable Type 3.2. The left sidebar now features a search function; automagically generated indexes by genre, author, and series, which I hope will make it easier for you to find your way around (I know it will make my life easier); and, just for fun, a link to a random entry. The comment system has also changed, but it shouldn’t affect you unless you’re a spammer.

All posts and comments have been imported (some of the multi-book posts are somewhat awkwardly split up to make the indexes work, but they’re here), and all old links work. Thanks to Michael Bruce for writing the script to import comments from Blogkomm.

[Implementation details have been moved to the about page.]

6 Replies to “[2005] Site relaunch & implementation notes”

  1. Congrats on the redesign. If you hadn’t said something, I probably wouldn’t have noticed, which is a sign of a job well done, IMNSHO.

  2. Love the new format, with one tiny quibble: on the main page, the sidebar of recent comment links is waaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of long scroll.
    Otherwise, very nice.

  3. David: re format: I think I’ve reproduced the bug, it’s in IE 6, yes?
    Here’s the deal: in CSS, I told the recent comments list to be a certain width, so that on short pages, they wouldn’t stretch across the page below the right-side content, because I thought that looked ugly. However, the sidebar already has a width specified, and IE apparently can’t deal with a width inside a width. Or something.
    The current fix is changing it to a max-width CSS property; IE apparently doesn’t recognize this, so the weird pushing-down doesn’t happen, at the expense of the comments not staying nicely within their sidebar on short pages. (Opera and Netscape, which is what I can test it on at the moment, seem to recognize the CSS fine.)
    If anyone else has a more elegant solution, do let me know.

  4. Re: recent comments sidebar–while I’m fiddling with this, which would people prefer, the last ten *comments* or the last ten *posts* with comments?

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