Small Improvements Here and There


I’ve been making small improvements here and there over the past few days. As noted before, I added the nifty little popup scripting for external links. I’ve also been making small tweaks to the style sheets. A few things were a bit hard to read, etc, so I’ve tried to correct that. Just recently (ie, a few minutes ago), I restyled the front page of the site. The previous setup was based on a concept similar to something I’d seen Zeldman do. While retaining something of that design, I’ve also made it a bit more dynamic by incorporating the latest four post topics in the page. I had a feeling people just going to the top level wouldn’t notice that something was always happening in the land of talktalk.

How did I pull it off? Pretty easy, actually. Talktalk, or perhaps more accurately my install of Word Press, outputs an RSS feed (as I’ve discussed before… in fact, you can see a link to the feed in the sidebar). All I did was incorporate an RSS aggregator into the main page of the site, which parses the feed back into workable text. Some PHP and a little formatting, and bingo, Chester, we have headlines.

In the coming weeks, I intend to spice up the graphical side of the site (especially the header… it’s a bit plain-jane). Not too much, but enough to make me feel a bit better about the whole world judging me by it. And of course, I’ll be filling out the remainder of the sections of the site. Somewhere in there I’ll start writing my OSX tutorials…