filed under: truist.com, usability

Posted 111 days ago

Inspired by my copy of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, I’ve been working on a redesign of this site since last March, and I’ve finally finished it and published it. The redesign doesn’t change the actual content at all, and in that sense is somewhat unimportant. It does dramatically change the look of the site, though, and in that sense is somewhat interesting. I also took the opportunity to refactor the underlying code that generates the site, to make it easier to maintain and redesign in the future.

Of course, if you’re reading this via the email feed, it’s not going to look much different! Click here to go to the website and see it for yourself, and/or read about everything that changed.

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filed under: truist.com

Posted 609 days ago

You may have noticed that all my sites were down for a few days – truist.com, gwen.truist.com, and paul.medgyessy.com. My apologies for that – there was a problem with the network connection where my server is hosted. Everything should be back up now.

And of course, all my email got through :)

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filed under: truist.com

Posted 754 days ago

...be aware that the reason you keep getting multiple emails from the site, each with seemingly the same content as the last, is that each time a person comments it causes a new update to be sent out. You can tell the difference by the number in brackets after the subject; that number tells how many comments there are. So, for example, you’ll soon be getting an email with a subject of “My belief in God [4]” because I’ll have added the fourth comment to it.

The problem, then, is that you can’t see the comments in the email that gets sent to you. Thus, I recommend that you always click the link to read the article directly on the website. In that way, you’ll get the article in it’s original context and you’ll have the comments.

Questions? Please post them in the comments for this article ;-)

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filed under: geek, tagging, textpattern, truist.com, tru_tags

Posted 804 days ago

When I first created this blog I wanted it to have tagging support, which doesn’t come built into Textpattern (my blog software). At the time (Christmas 2005), tagging plugins for Textpattern were virtually nonexistent. Hunting around the web, I found ran_tags, chh_keywords, rss_unlimited_categories, and ajw_technorati_tags. They were all unworkable for me, because of bugs or complexity or feature-set, so I was left without tagging support.

So I wrote my own, based on ran_tags. I published it on the textpattern forums and subsequently released about a dozen new versions, each with new features to make it more powerful and/or easier to use. The plugin has seen a lot of adoption, and seems to be popular among the textpattern community. You can see it in use on this site.

It’s written with ease-of-use, simplicity, and security in mind, and it has a very rich feature set. To learn more, please check out the features list. There is one (potential) downside for some users, though. To help keep the code simple, I call out to the Textpattern code to actually do the tag search. That means that articles can only be tagged via the Keywords field, rather than using a custom field. Some people use the keywords field for other purposes, so they can’t use tru_tags. There are also a few other minor annoyances documented on the features page.

tru_tags can be downloaded from the releases page, and you can learn to use it by reading the detailed usage instructions. If you have questions, please post comments to any of these articles, or in the forum, and I’ll get back to you quickly.

Enjoy!

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filed under: life, truist.com

Posted 833 days ago

1. I’m not reading any of my (30) RSS feeds any more. (It’s amazing how disconnected I am from the geek world, now.) I’ve stopped because I can’t find a decent web-based feed reader anywhere. I usually use Thunderbird, which does it just right, but then my feeds are tied to a particular machine and I switch machines (and logins!) too often for that to be acceptable. In the meantime, I’m working on writing my own web-based reader and once it’s done I’ll switch to it. (If you’re interested, my reader is written in Ruby on Rails, and it will work much like Thunderbird, but in a browser.)
2. Matt and I are slowly working on a wishlist app so we have a good way to keep and publish and track our wishlists. This seems like an obvious thing that ought to already exist, but it doesn’t. I’ve been using Amazon’s but they seem to enjoy making it less-useful occasionally, and it won’t let me track things that aren’t available on amazon.com. So again, once this new one is developed I’ll switch to it.
3. I will eventually be converting my existing gallery to ZenPhoto, because Gallery sucks. The only reason I haven’t switched before this is that there wasn’t a better product out there.

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filed under: truist.com

Posted 839 days ago

I’ve turned on commenting, so you’ll be able to add comments to any articles I write. It was an unexpected pain to get it set up and looking right, but at this point it should look good and be easy to use. If something doesn’t work well, please let me know.

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