After a slew of mockups and sketches varying from wicked worn to ultra-clean and from 3 columns to 5 columns, the new site has launched and remains true to its four-column, no-real-look-or-concept roots. But I like it. I like it alot — way more than the last site and arguably the most of pretty much all of my sites ever. I just wanted a back-to-basics, minimal, information-first type of deal and I think that’s what I got. In honor of this launch I wanted to provide a rundown of sorts.

Posts

As you may have noticed, beginning with Chicago, pt 2 posts will no longer have an image associated with them by default. I made this decision for a number of reasons. First of all, having an image to go with the post was keeping me from posting as frequently as I’d like; there are certain days, as evidenced in the archives, that the image and the words have nothing to do with one another anyway so why associate the two? Secondly, flickr has way more power and capacity than I could ever hope to match, and so they are my new choice for hosting images. They will make organization and sharing easier, and they have a number of nifty features that I wanted to try out.

Images

Like I said, I’m now using flickr for these. I use the flickrRSS plugin to wrap the images in the appropriate elements and display them onsite; it’s minimalist in its options but it does what I need and does it well. Over the weekend I also experimented with a variety of image uploading techniques. Flickr’s web uploader is quite nice and I prefer it over Flidget, a Dashboard widget that, while convenient, only lets you tag and upload one image at a time. The cream of the crop is flickr’s own Flickr Uploadr which gives you about 95% of the capabilities of the web admin panel without ever having to open your browser.

Links

I continue to use del.icio.us for links because it’s just so damn easy, but upon discovering that they provide a JavaScript alternative to Magpie (my old PHP method of fetching the links) I decided to try that out. Implementation is fairly basic, though I was challenged by the code because I wanted the link to include not just the headline but the description as well (and all function as a link). This is what I came up with:

function showImage(img){ return (function(){ img.style.display='inline' }) }
var span =document.createElement('span')
for (var i=0, post; post = Delicious.posts[i]; i++) {
    var a = document.createElement('a')
    a.setAttribute('href', post.u)
    a.setAttribute('class', "entry")
    var h3 = document.createElement('h3')
    var p = document.createElement('p')
    h3.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post.d))
    p.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post.n))
    a.appendChild(h3)
    a.appendChild(p)
    span.appendChild(a)
}
document.getElementById('delish').appendChild(span)

The result is exactly what I was aiming for. The del.icio.us method seems more capable than the Magpie route with its ability to show favicons and tags in addition to just the title and description.

Feeds

If you wander down to the footer, which you should be able to see by the time you’re reading this, you’ll notice that I’ve finally added a feed link to more easily obtain the RSS for this site. If you’re interested, here’s the master list of feeds in case you want to follow my photos or links as well as the words: