in which more is done with less

I've been inspired to take a more minimalist approach with the design of this site.

Most obvious is the reduction of administrative debris, though I think the new typographical choices also improve readability. There were things in the old design that I added because "all blogs need them" that in retrospect feel superfluous. As a bonus, the site is far easier to read in non-graphical user agents.

I was suprised how well I like the all-in-one archive page that Pilgrim suggests, though I will probably like it more once it gets broken up by month. It also needs to be more discoverable. I still haven't figured out if I'm going to add back in a search box or blogroll somehow, but I'll definitely be putting the comment form back up soon.

One thing I wanted to add that didn't make it into the design is a photo of myself. It seems vain, but after attending a few conferences and noticing how easy it was to recognize other people who do the same and going unrecognized myself, it made me realize that facial-recognition is pretty valuable. Still, I hate to sully the purity of this textual layout.

On a related note, I added in those nifty <link rel="next/prev" [...]> tags into the header of each page. Unfortunately if you're using Firefox you'll need an extension to make use of them, but Conkeror's got support built in bound to a double-press of the square bracket keys. It's remarkable what a difference little bits of extra metadata can make once you've got them integrated into your browsing habits.

Update: tried browsing the site in Firefox for a while without the prev/next links in chrome... it's a pain. So I added in hyperlinks for now. But it wouldn't hurt to petition browser creators to expose this juicy bit of metadata instead of just throwing it away.

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