What Lies Beneath…

I’ve spent what must amount to a whole 5 days in the last two weeks developing and enhancing navigation for this site. I’m not finished and it will be a while before I do finish, simply because I also have the unwelcome job of going through every posting on this site and tagging it with relevant tags. Right now I’m painfully aware that there are bugs in the navigation, but I’d rather it was made available because it will motivate me to fix the bugs and add tags.

If you look down the side of the page you will now see 5 navigation buttons, that provide the following capabilities:

• The one labeled with a C displays a list of postings by category and covers every posting that’s been made to this blog (which is about 750).
• The one labeled with an E display the same things except that postings are “Expanded” and hence shows the first paragraph for each posting.
• The one labeled with a G takes you to a page where you can use Google to search this site. There’s more to that one than meets the eye, but what lies beneath isn’t going to meet the eye for quite a while yet, so I’ll not try to explain it.
• The one labeled with an S lists postings by subject. I don’t intend to assign subjects to all postings (and right now this capability is very primitive because I’ve not done anything like enough tagging to make it useful.
• The one labeled with a V lists postings by IT vendor. So if you want to see every posting that refers to, say, Google, you can. This also demands more tagging if it’s going to be useful.

Lets set aside the fact that there’s some work to be done before the last two actually become useful and, hopefully, there’s a chance that you’ll be able to browse this site effectively, should you so wish. If you allow the site to use cookies then you may also find it useful that only the llinks to postings you haven’t read are underlined.

Tags and Tag Clouds

I’m not finished, by the way. I intend to add a tag cloud and a tag list. You’ll see what these are when they turn up. Every blogger and his dog seems to provide a tag cloud, so I’ll do so too, but I’m not sure it’ll get used much.

I’ve got to the point with PHP where I’m coding like a code warrior, so it’s quite likely that I’ll be building in a good deal more capability. However, I’m not really building it for this site – I may have an interesting theory about rich navigation, but I don’t have a pressing need for this site to provide that.  This site is a test bed for other developments that are in progress.

There will be a tags page and a tag cloud by this time next week. After that, I’ll add the home page that this site has hankered after for a whole year. Yes, it’s true, this site has no home page.