I took the snow-day opportunity to tie up the last bit of development and launch a minor revision to the site, bringing the version to 21.1. Visually this is just a small, incremental improvement, but I’ve done quite a bit on the back-end. There are a few little touches throughout that you will probably like. Here are some highlights:
- Social Media Integration: Much as I don’t like it, people are spending more and more time on Twitter and in the ‘walled garden’ of Facebook—and, consequently, less time visiting real web sites like this one. New Off on a Tangent posts are now automatically cross-posted at my previously-disused Twitter and Facebook pages.
- Pretty Photo & Gallery Pop-Ups: If you click on a photo in an entry, it’ll now come up in a nice little pop-up (powered by Thickbox). Click on one and you’ll see what I mean. You can even click through multiple photos in an entry from within the pop-up.
- Mobile Site Improvements: The mobile site looks about the same as it did before, but the code is heavily reworked (and faster). Now that I’ve dropped support for the ancient Palm OS ‘Blazer’ browser I could write some modern code for the mobile side.
- Holiday Information: For a long time, special images have appeared at the top-right of the site on particular religious and civil holidays. Now, mousing-over the image on a holiday will give you a little pop-up with the name of the holiday, a brief description, and a link for more information. Oh, and mobile users get a holiday notification now too.
Lots of other small (mostly-technical) changes are part of this release, so if anything isn’t working for you please let me know!