Site Work
by Jon Shea
21 July 2005
As you may have noticed, I’ve made some changes to the site.
This blog now runs it’s own installation of TextPattern, independent from www.dartmouth.edu/~jshea (which no longer even exists). The former setup bothered me.
There’s still some bugs and broken links. If they bother you, I suggest that you fix them. Everyone who has an account has the power to make any possible changes, except Bill. If you’d like some inspiration, then go here. I’m going to try to find a different, slightly greener, design for the front page.
Oh, the important part. To log in to the site go to http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jshea/blog/textpattern/index.php
Slightly different than it used to be.
As always, if you are not yet an author for the Collaboration, and would like to be then please email me.
Finally, a note on style directed at the NYT. Often writers put computer code or URL’s at the end of a sentence, right before a period. I think, in this situation, the period should be omitted.
Jul 21, 07:20 PM
I love my completely valid of powerless position. But had I power, I would place a big fat period at the end of that sentence, cause otherwise I feel like the URL is floating indeterminately, indiscriminately, ineffably into outer space. Which makes me as uncomfortable as J Depp as W Wonka.
Jul 22, 03:49 AM
Maybe 10 characters wider would be nice. I don’t like it when three vaguely connected sentences look like a paragraph. And you added indents! No, I don’t do paragraphs. Three vaguely connected sentances. Then a vertical gap.
Jul 22, 04:45 AM
Bill, I think floating is space is better than typing “www.dartmouth.edu/~jshea/blog.” and getting an error. Obviously, the best solution is to keep the confusing stuff away from the end of the sentence.
Tom, you’re welcome to change the CSS.
Jul 22, 06:30 AM
Bill, I think floating is space is better than typing www.dartmouth.edu/~jshea/blog. and getting an error
URLs usually don’t end in periods. I would automatically assume that whatever I read in the paper did not include the final period. But maybe this is because I am so much smarter than you.
(The page should be wider. It looks…tight.)
Jul 22, 06:43 AM
Listen, I don’t understand CSS. I don’t have time to learn CSS. I wish I could spend 30 minutes with a book, whip something up, and cross post if over at CSS Garden, but I can’t. I’m not that smart.
If I want to make the page wider, I have to play trial-and-error edit in the file, until it happens to do what I want. I’m done with that for a month. If any of you want to, you are so empowered. He’ll, you could toss this one entirely and come up with your own.
Finally, are you guys ok with a link that looks like this http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jshea/blog/index.php?id=251#comment?
Jul 22, 07:24 AM
Regarding periods after URL and e-mail: A common convention to avoid this problem is to wrap the address in angle brackets so that its boundaries are clear. Most software that allows click-selection of addresses will understand this, and it allows you to end with a period, satisfying your inner typography geek.
Unfortunately, your current installation seems to eat angle brackets, even if you escape them properly as < and >.
Regarding link geometry: That looks fine to me, although you could probably get rid of the “index.php” entirely if you add a line like “DirectoryIndex index.php” to your .htaccess file for the blog directory.