I‘ve changed the layout of my website. I‘ve done this for three reasons.
Firstly, I was having a a hard time keeping the size of the excerpt small enough for the layout I had before, especially on the home page. So it was becoming a bit of a pain trying to introduce an article effectively with a small number of words.
I had a conflicting requirement with the ATOM feed. If someone is checking my site for new articles using a feed reader then all they‘ll see is a small amount of text which I may have failed to make representative of the larger article.
Which leads me to the second reason for the change. The way I had my site laid out required that each article was substantial. That is to say, significantly larger than the excerpt. This is because the only place the main body is shown is on a page of its own. This fact alone has prevented me from writing an article because it wasn‘t big enough! Now every list of articles, whether on the home page or listing by category shows the entire body of the article. Now I can just write a couple of paragraphs and it won;t look silly — I think.
Also, the narrow article display of the home page was not comparing favourably to the wider style on all other pages. I thought it looked a bit odd and – given it‘s a likely landing page for many visitors – it needed addressing.
Unfortunately the new layout has highlighted some shortcomings of my implementation. Specifically – now that there‘s a lot more content on each page I‘ve noticed that the Textile4J & JHighlight formatting I put in place is not playing nice with the CPU. So I'll need to do some refactorings for some faster internet servings .
Anyway, once that is settled, I‘ll be back to doing more exciting things like training for The Helly Hansen Adventure-X and Bristol BikeFest, both of which I‘m competing in this year.
First published on Jan 26, 2009. Last updated on: Jan 27, 2009.
I'm Elwyn Malethan and this is my blog. I am an aspiring 