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?