Design tweaks on home page
Monday, December 28, 2015 by Dave Winer

I've been tweaking up the look of the blog panel on the Scripting News home page. 

Previously it had been displaying my Twitter icon in the left margin, and author info and Twitter handle. Since this site has only one author, it seemed a waste of space to repeat my name and Twitter handle for each post. 

Because there was more room, I made the title larger, and increased the maximum characters displayed to 60. It looks so much better! 

I wonder if you can tell that there's a new kind of CMS running behind Scripting News now? It can handle multiple authors per blog, and uses Twitter identity for membership. 

I've been working elsewhere for the last couple of weeks, so I could gain a new perspective on this project as a user, in addition to being a developer. I wondered if I would still like it as much as I did when I was working on the code all the time. I do! As you can see from the output, I've had a fairly prolific period in the second half of December. Just writing about an hour a day. The tool is pretty good. And now I have a better perspective on it as a user.

Thinking about next steps...

  • If you're taking requests :) it'd be cool to get notifications on updates (including comments) to posts I'd interacted with. I'm not sure if Twitter login provides a mechanism for that, but Web Notifications are coming along (http://caniuse.com/#feat=notifications).

    • That's one of the things I'm thinking about. Believe it or not I had a great solution to this problem in the early 80s with a product called LBBS.