June 22nd, 2008 by Jemaleddin Cole

So, in the inter­ests of min­i­mal­ism, I’ve removed most of the cruft from the site. I wasn’t using much of it, and I can’t imag­ine that anyone else is either. I added in a number of new fea­tures, mostly for myself, that Mark Pil­grim has been using as he makes his site more min­i­mal - inspired by the exact blog posts that I’d been read­ing. It’s a small Inter­net. (In fact we both prob­a­bly found those posts through Simon Willison’s book­marks, which makes it an even smaller Internet.)

I added in OpenID sup­port for those that like it. This allows you to verify that you are who you say you are - sort of. What it really says is that you are the person affil­i­ated with a given URL, which isnt’ the same thing at all. And to be per­fectly honest, it actu­ally allows some­body to say that they know the pass­word nec­es­sary to make use of a cer­tain URL or a way to exploit the system that nobody has fig­ured out a way around, so it doesn’t really mean much of any­thing. Still, handy.

I also added an Open Search fea­ture so if you’re using a sup­port­ing browser (Fire­fox and IE 7 at the moment, I think) you could add Tan­gle­Bones to the list of search tools in your browsers search box. I don’t know why you would, since search­ing Google along with “tanglebones” or some­thing is more likely to get what you want, but it’s mostly there so that I can use it. But since I also made the search results much more help­ful, it’s better than nothing.

One very nice change for me is that the page itself should shrink and grow nicely with each user’s indi­vid­ual font set­tings. If you scale up the fonts, every­thing should con­tinue to work pretty well. Since my eyes aren’twhat they used to be, I find myself bump­ing up the font sizes on many sites, and having my own site in order is impor­tant to me.

Besides all of that and a few behind-​the-​scenes changes, I also made the var­i­ous kinds of pages (date-​based archives, cat­e­gory pages, search results) more con­sis­tent and useful, while also cut­ting back on the amount of mean­ing­less debris clut­ter­ing up the page.

If you see any­thing else that can be removed, let me know. And if you think some­thing needs to come back, I’d like to hear that as well.

But there’s still one clut­tery bit left on the site. Word­Press lets you define a “tagline” or “description” of your site - right now mine says, “A Per­sonal Website,” which isn’t ter­ri­bly useful or descrip­tive. So here’s your task: tell me what to put in there. What short, pos­si­bly pithy phrase sums up this place? I’m at a loss, so any­thing you come up with is prob­a­bly an improve­ment. Anything?

3 Responses to “Any good ideas?”

1. Will any of the CSS posi­tion­ing ideas I sug­gested work for you? I don’t know how much flex­i­bil­ity your cur­rent WP theme allows. I’m still trying to think of a good tag line for you but I got noth­ing so far.

   Here’s an idea… dump WP alto­gether and build a blog­ging inter­face that meets ALL your needs. C’mon, you know you wanna. ;o)

   — jet June 24th, 2008 at 4:32 pm #

2. Hmmmm - dump Word­Press alto­gether. And rewrite all the core func­tion­al­ity And the dozens of plu­g­ins I use (min­i­mal­ism ain’t easy, people). And then worry that I made mis­takes that might com­pro­mise the secu­rity of the site… Yeah, no.

   I have lots of flex­i­bil­ity with the CSS - but I think I’m going to avoid OVER­COM­PLI­CAT­ING things. :-) I did add a “max-width: 90%” which makes me quite happy.

   — Jemaleddin Cole June 24th, 2008 at 5:47 pm #

3. Hap­haz­ard, but orga­nized?

   — CanadiensFan July 4th, 2008 at 1:45 am #

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website