Thursday, January 17, 2008

Updates


  • I’ve revamped how Labels work on Journal Entries; they were getting out of hand. Now there are just a few Categories; every post will have one (and, hopefully, only one) of these. Beneath the Categories in the sidebar of Journal Entries (not Current Thoughts, where this is posted; Categories have yet to get out of hand here) are various Labels; a post may have none, one, or more than one of these. Note that as I’m using Blogger’s Labels for both my Categories and Labels, they will be mixed up together at the bottom of individual posts, in alphabetical order. But the Categories links are useful for making sure you see all the posts in Journal Entries, anyway, without having to navigate through the somewhat cumbersome Archives links, as all posts with a given Category, regardless of date, will show up when you click on that Category’s link either in the sidebar or at the bottom of a post, and all posts have a Category.

  • Book Notes with multiple entries for one book also are Labeled with the book title to make it easier to see all the posts on that book at once; these book-title Labels do not appear in the sidebar, so they are only found on the relevant posts. I will also include an author label when I post about multiple books from one author.

  • I’ve also changed the links for all the little book graphics (and most other book links) to Google Books rather than Amazon.com. Google Books has lots of neat features, including internal previews of many books, and a link to reserve a copy at your local library. If you’re having trouble understanding a Book Note and want to see if you can find the context, Google Books might help. If not, there’s an Amazon link on every page; they often have previews too.

  • On another note, because of the way I’ve structured this blog, it’s quite likely that entries in the compendium are outdated and have been updated and improved in their Department blog. Click on the link at the bottom of each post in the compendium to see the latest and greatest version of that post.

  • Although I’m not entirely sure why I’m going to all this work; I seem to currently have a grand total of one verified email subscription (the widget in the sidebar in the compendium says two, but one of them is me) to this blog. Is no one reading this? Or are they just not using the email subscription feature? I do hope somebody’s reading this, or else I’m doing a whole lot of work for nothing; I looked yesterday and noticed that, even with all of the journal entries I’ve posted, I’ve only gotten through something like a fifth of my first journal so far, so there’s lots more coming…

  • That reminds me: since entries in Journal Entries are posted by their original creation date (years ago in most cases), it is likely that newly posted entries will not appear at the top of the blog. This means that if you’re watching Journal Entries to see if there are new posts, you’re going to miss them. Either subscribe to Journal Entries via email or subscribe to or watch the compendium, or you’re going to miss the new journal entries. Yeah, it sucks, but I can’t think of a better way; I’ll be posting stuff from several journals written at different times, and I think it’s worthwhile to keep the entries in chronological order.

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