The Right Glue
April 2009
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More layout than you can handle
By Dean
(2009-04-15 20:01:23)
I've made some changes to the site since the last big update. Mostly little things here and there, but once again I want to bring them into the spotlight in the interest of full disclosure, sharing ideas and to elaborate on why I do these crazy things that I do.
The first thing is I've changed the way URLs are constructed on this site. I got the idea from Stack Overflow to use URLs that are a bit more descriptive and friendly than simply view.php?postid=50. In reality, the title portion of the URL isn't used by any part of the site, it's just there to give people an idea of what the page is about if it's posted bare on a forum or IRC channel. It's also something that should help my site's ranking in search engines (a process called search engine optimization). Not that I haven't already gotten lots of weird hits from Google before...
Another thing I've done that you may have seen is the year and month drop-down lists next to the search text box. It used to have one entry for every month/year combination. At the time I changed it, there were 19 fields in that drop-down list.
Drop-down lists are an odd UI element, because they're so natural when you think about them but they're so damned hard to use. You can't filter them, and if they're not sorted it's really hard to find the item you want if there are a lot of items in them. My general rule for drop-down lists is if the list grows to larger than 20 elements, I use something else. In this case, it was natural to split the single year/month list into two smaller lists: one for year that will increase over time, and one for month that will remain fixed as long as we continue using the Gregorian calendar.
Splitting the drop-downs up also gave me the opportunity to have yearly archives in addition to monthly archives which were all that was previously available. That's brand new functionality that logically followed from a minor UI change. Interesting how that works out.
If you happen to pick a month without picking a year, the site will show you the selected month from the current year. I decided on this functionality after some debate. Originally I had a view defined that showed the selected month no matter what year it was, but I couldn't possibly understand how a view like that would be useful to anyone. My view is defaulting to the current year is simple and unsurprising, so it is a sound UI decision.
If you disagree, you can now tell me not only in the comments, but also on the contact page. After the fiasco with that Stack Overflow user posting unrelated comments on my blog, I figured it would be a good idea to give users a chance to contact me directly instead of cluttering my wonderful website. The contact form is linked from every post by clicking on the author name (that's the part that says Dean in the top right) and also in the footnote. You fill in your rant in the fields, press "Submit" and by some magical force the message finds its way through a series of tubes into my lap.
The magical force is actually Google Mail's SMTP server. The form submits an e-mail to me so that I can receive e-mail without spreading my e-mail address around the Internets for prying eyes to see. The contact form has the same spam protection I've implemented for the comments to keep the Cialis bots out. I set up the contact page in my "live development" environment for a few weeks to see if any bots would find it. My inbox is clean, so I can only assume that it either works or my site has lost its incredible fame and popularity. It must be the former.
Another feature I've just added today is the archive page, which links every year, month and post on this site, all on one page. The link to the archive is right next to the year drop-down list, which I thought was an appropriate place for it given its relationship with yearly and monthly archives.
The archive page is grouped by year, then by month and then it lists every post's name along with its number of comments (sort of to indicate how popular that post was). The years are links to the yearly archives; the months are links to the monthly archives; the posts are links to the posts. All very unsurprising if I do say so myself.
One compromise I had to make with respect to the archive is the use of tables to lay it out. Tables are not usually a good thing in web design because some types of accessibility software have trouble dealing with them. But there really is no other way to create a layout that is both vertically and horizontally aligned the way the archive page is. I mitigated the potential accessibility issues by making sure the table cells appear in the same order in which they are written in the source HTML (which is one of the bigger accessibility concerns). Also, the content of the table is arguably tabular by nature anyway, so even HTML+CSS zealots would have trouble coming up with valid reasons why the layout is problematic. I can certainly live with it.
With both the archive and contact pages, the site's overall look and feel is consistent. Each of those pages are presented with the same title and subtitle style, the same footnote and the same soft-bordered rectangle with a random image on the side. Consistent look and feel is one of the most important aspects of software design and it's very easy to overlook sometimes. Beyond the obvious benefit of being able to immediately tell what site a page is from just by looking at it, consistency has a lot of other benefits as well. The bottom line is when users know what to expect, they are able to get more done with your software.
Once again, if you have any suggestions, comments or complaints regarding the layout in general or these changes specifically, I welcome your input. I make the changes with you, my readers, in mind so if I messed up I want to hear about it.
Comment on this post (3 comments so far)
Latest comments:
Comment by Dupe (2009-04-20 20:15:53)
Re; Comment by Dean (2009-04-21 07:45:25)
Comment by Dupe (2009-05-14 18:32:40)
Donutomology
By Doug
(2009-04-01 00:26:12)
To celebrate my new layout I wanted to talk to you about donutomological biology. You see, I am the world's foremost donutomologist and wanted to cover with you some details regarding donut taxonomy.
(If you can't read this post due to the colours, please refresh your browser for a new set of colours. If you can't read this post, then how do you know you should refresh your browser to get a new set of colours? This kind of mystery is better left to a mysterographer. I'm just a donutomologist. Leave me alone.)
It all started when I was but a boy of five. I got to see Tim Horton, the world famous donut hunter, for my birthday. I was thrilled. The man was seven feet tall, covered from head to toe in donut skeletons. I had always idolized him for bringing the delicious donut from the plains of Saskatchewan to my plate at his store. I'll never forget what he told me that day: "Donuts never sleep." I dedicated my life to studying this elusive animal from that day forth.
Donuts are grazing animals that mostly come from Saskatchewan. They move around by rolling through fields of icing sugar flowers, gathering their sweet sugary nectar on the sides of their pastry bodies. The donuts then lie to rest, or find pools of water to mix with their icing sugar stores to form glazes and dips which they use to keep themselves warm over the long winter months.
The anatomy of a donut is simple. Its pastry outer layer keeps the internal goo warm and free from harm. The goo on the inside serves as brain and digestive tract. Usually it is fruit flavoured because the donuts subsist on fruits and berries lying in the plains. Some varieties of donut feed on cow milk and other strange things and so their organs are cream- or chocolate-based. This type of donut is usually the most delicious.
Donuts reproduce by cloning. A piece of donut will break off the parent donut and become a small, pastry sphere. These are called Timbits, named after Tim Horton himself. Once the Timbits have eaten enough, they grow into full goo-filled donuts.
Donut hunters have two primary methods of killing the wild donuts. The first, more traditional method is to shoot the goo right out of the donut. Without the thinking part, donuts lie helpless to be picked up and deep fried. The shot is usually very clean and results in the typical toroidal donut shape with which all Canadians are familiar. The other method is to drown the donut. This ensures the delicious thinking goo remains inside the donut, though hunters find it much less sportsmanlike.
Darwin taught us that donuts evolved from the aquatic fritter, which is oddly shaped compared to its rounder cousin because it doesn't need to use a rolling form of locomotion. Fritters merely have to twist and turn to get through the water. Fritters are usually killed by drying them out. They secrete a sugary coating in the process similar to the land-based donut's winter coat.
Other extant relatives of the donut include the European variant eclair (Eclairans europeanus) and the hardy African walnut (Nuttus delicious) crunch.
As recently as the last quarter century, there were still fearsome carnivorous donuts (Donutae tyrannus) that stalked their prey in the Albertan badlands. This horrible monster rolled eight feet tall, with its terrifying gaping maw capable of consuming an entire man whole. Like the dodo bird it helped extinguish, the carnivorous donut was eradicated by man in 1987. Thankfully so, since it was the number-one cause of death in North America. They tasted awful, too.
Currently there are five accepted major species of donut in the Donutae genus: blanca, the white, fluffy kind of donut; lactus, the sour-cream donut; cioccolata, the rich, chocolaty donut; cruelli, the crueller; and crustulum, the dense, cake-like donut. Each of these species has many different subspecies that differ mostly by the types of food they prefer to eat and by what confections they use to protect themselves from the cold.
Despite what happened to the carnivorous donut, no extant donut species are threatened by industrialization. Surprisingly, no one has attempted to domesticate the donut as a farm animal, since donuts raised in captivity all for some reason end up tasting like old socks. The reason for this is still unknown and is one of the greatest open problems in biocheminomical science. Other than humans, donuts have no known natural predators, probably because everything is still too afraid of carnivorous donuts.
So the next time you bite down on the fried body of one of these animals, make sure to remember the history behind them. And remember Tim Horton, who gave his life while ridding the world of the last sleepless man-eating abomination.
Comment on this post (7 comments so far)
Latest comments:
Donutae cioccolata mintus by Doug (2009-04-01 07:31:42)
Donutae Blanca blossomi by Tex (2009-04-02 03:18:35)
About time! by Dean (2009-04-02 06:35:51)
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This is some kind of footnote. This webpage is awesome and can be viewed in any browser. Even ones that suck ass like Safari and Firefox. Isn't that awesome? This site is best viewed with browsers that aren't maximized on large-resolution displays (> 1024 pixels in width). But then again, if you are running a large resolution and browsing maximized, then you're a terrible person so you don't really deserve to see this site at its finest. Jerk. I mean, seriously. I spend all this time making a nice site and your silly browsing habits ruin its look. That's really cold, man. If you're using IE6, then in order to see the cool avatar effects you need to enable JavaScript. No rights reserved by Dean Whelton (who is awesome) of any of the content, images, design, backend or electrons used in this site. Steal at your convenience. None of it is worth stealing anyway, so there. I have even made an RSS feed for more efficient theft of my intellectual property: CLICK IT NOW!!! Now, don't say I'm not generous. I guess if you want to know more about me, you can visit the about page. It's not really an about page, though. It's just one of the first posts. I don't feel like making a real about page. You can contact me, too. If you feel like it. Are you really wasting time reading this? Go outside or something.