Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Overnight I made several changes to the layout and rendering of pages on DLTJ — both in its web presentation and in its RSS presentation. The changes were really driven by the fact that my tags were not getting picked up in Technorati because the Wordpress UltimateTagWarrior plugin was not including them as expected in the RSS feed (although it was in the web presentation, which was throwing me off). And I’ve heard from some (hi, Karen!) that when I make changes to the RSS rendering that Bloglines makes it look like all of the posts have been updated. This isn’t the case — just the rendering of them has changed. You’d think that Bloglines would read the “>pubdate<” tag and figure this out for itself, but it doesn’t. So to all of the Bloglines users, you can ignore all of the “new” posts from DLTJ except for this one — the content has not changed in those earlier posts.

Knowing that changes were to be made, I also went through a whole bunch of desired changes to the layout of DLTJ that had stacked up as, individually, were not important enough to do. So some other things that you’ll see:

Clearer “Tags” heading

I wasn’t really pleased with how UltimateTagWarrior was displaying links to the various social tagging services. Which is to say, if you didn’t know what the little 16×16 graphic is, having them strung across the page isn’t really going to help you. So I put them into a table with a header that explains what each graphic means. I’m not entirely happy with this layout either, but it will stay for a while until I think-of/run-across something better.

No more chronological home page

I’ve got to agree with Jarrod Trainque in his analysis of the typical blog homepage: “Like most bloggers, I don’t get a ton of front-page traffic. My visitor logs show that most of my visitors come via google, and land on a specific page…. The most recent articles appear on the front page, with the newest posts at the top…. How often do you only know when something was posted, and use that as the primary deciding factor when navigating within a site? Rarely, I bet. It’s just not useful information to anyone but the weblog author.” So the home page of DLTJ now embeds the Extended Live Archive on the home page so that if you start from the home page you can more easily find content that may interest you. (Including chronological, if that is your choice.)

The Funky Feedburner Links Are Gone

When you turn on Feedburner’s per-item tracking the links it provides turn out to be really long and ugly. So long and ugly that I care less about any kind of statistics Feedburner might generate than annoying the rest of you who might try to copy down the URLs and pass them around. So URLs to all of the posts have changed. I haven’t figured out yet of the old ones will still work. Probably not. Sorry ’bout that.

There were some other tweaks, including a new ‘favicon.ico’ for those that bookmark DLTJ pages. If you notice anything strange that seems unresolved, please let me know.