Tuesday, October 2, 2012; 1:23:15 PM Eastern
Scripting.com redesign
I've been working up to this for a few months, now it's time to flip the switch and replace the old Scripting News home page with the new simplified and enriched version. Yes, it's got more features, but it's even cleaner than before.- 1. The menu is at the top of the page, unchanged, as promised. I said it would be a fixture through the transition, so if you found your way around the various sites that make up Scripting News, the links are still be there after the transition. This helps smooth out what I find to be a jarring about website redesign. You know how to find everything and then all of a sudden -- where did it go?
- 2. There's a new About feature, very easy to find, in the upper-left corner, patterned after the approach taken in the Media Hackers site. And of course it's an outline, stored in my Dropbox folder, so it's reallly easy for me to edit.
- 3. The banner is now down the left edge instead of across the top. But continuity is maintained. It's still the same typeface, but it's even bigger than the one before. I think ones' name should be bold and big.
- 4. The biggest change is probably the most subtle. The text on the home page is rendered by the new outline renderer in op.render.viewOutline. This is the core rendering routine for the worldoutline software, but now it's so core it can be used in any application. So you see every bit of text exactly as it was meant to be rendered.
- 5. Comments are back. They of course, never really went away. I moved my editorial act, gradually over to the threads site, where it remains now. You can read the articles on the scripting.com home page, or on the threads site. The star at the bottom of each piece links to the page with comments, and the one with paragraph-level permalinks. If you want to point to one of my pieces you should point to the page on the threads site. It's the permanent view. The home page only shows the 25 most recent stories.
- 6. There is of course still an RSS feed, in exactly the same place. But there's also now a link in the head section of the HTML to a full outline of all the text in the new CMS, going back to March of this year when the threads site started. Nothing hard about this, because it's the outline where I do my writing. One big file for everything.
- Here's a snapshot of the Scripting News home page taken just before the transition.
- That's about it for now. Time for me to take a break, and when I come back, I'll fill in the links here and then flip the switch. Maybe tonight or early tomorrow.
