Haddock Blogs changes

This is a post for those of you reading this feed via Haddock Blogs. You may have noticed a few changes there. Here’s what’s changed.

First, obviously, a new design. Yay! I must be honest and acknowledge my inspiration, SeedConference.com, which reminded me that Times can indeed look gorgeous. The new design is now also the front page of haddock.org seeing as Haddock Blogs is the only live thing on the site right now.

The RSS feeds are now going through FeedBurner: Blogs, Links. Your old feed should now redirect, if the Internet Gods are playing along.

All the daily “Links” posts in the main Blogs feed no longer appear there. They are filtered out, and the respective authors’ del.icio.us feeds have been added to the Links feed instead.

Finally, those encoding errors that rendered certain characters illegible are no more. Well, almost. It drives me up the wall when I use code or software that can’t cope well with UTF8 encoding but I must hold my hands up and admit Haddock Blogs has been around for years and this is the first time I feel I’ve (nearly) cracked it myself. For more on this, read the next post if you’re technically inclined.

I hope the few of you who read the site or feed like the changes. If nothing else, it’s slightly less embarrassing than I found it before.

Comments

  • Hmm.

    This is a post for those of you reading this feed via Haddock Blogs

    --doesn't apply to me, but I clicked on the link so I could see Times looking nice, and when I followed through to http://www.haddock.org/directory/, I got a whole load of this:

    Warning: main(/data/vhost/www.haddock.org/includ… failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /filer/vhost/www.haddock.org/includ… on line 22
    Warning: main(): Failed opening '/data/vhost/www.haddock.org/includ… for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /filer/vhost/www.haddock.org/includ… on line 22
    Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /filer/vhost/www.haddock.org/includ… on line 464

    I imagine you probably already know this, but just in case...

    PS: I adore the stretchable comments box!

  • Many thanks for doing that, I'm particularly glad about your del.icio.us links stripping from the main blogs. Looks lovely too.

    I'll have to start feeding some more stuff into it.

  • As I implied on Twitter, my reaction to any site is to hate change, so it's a tribute to what a good design this is that this period of shocked annoyance lasted about two seconds. Congratulations on getting properly segregating the links feeds, too: I've been muttering darkly about duplication in aggregation for a few weeks and it's becoming clear I'm far from the only one who is both annoyed and trying to do something about it.

  • Alan: Thanks for pointing that out; one bit of tidying up too far on my part! It's all working now. I haven't done anything clever with the comments box... I'm guessing you're using Safari, which does this for all textareas I think.

    Paul: I've read your mutterings and been pleased to find I'm not alone in that regard too! I wish people offered unaggregated versions of their feeds too.

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Friday 25 April 2008, 3:35pm

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25 Apr 2008 at Twitter

  • 7:03pm: Stage Combat done. Waiting to meet Mary and friends for dinner in the City. Drunk men singing Spandau Ballet's 'Gold'.