The past weekend has been a little slow on the site front. The Roach did still manage a few updates though.
Update 1 was the change in the navigation menu visuals on internal pages (like writing, robotlab or here). As a designer, everything seems fairly obvious, and so one is often unable to understand how others may not see it in the same way. Yet this inability to notice the obvious is not because the people who visit my site are "special". It's just that when one is at an unfamiliar site - especially one with an unconventional navigation scheme like the one we have here at TiR - it is quite possible that you may have missed the original dark gray text that read "navigation". Niki pointed it out to me, and I immediately saw my design flaw. So now we have the bright and impossible-to-miss navigation container, complete with mouse arrow as visual cue. Niki's suggestion is to just put the text for each link also as part of those little icons, to further simplify things for viewers, but I am still resisting that idea for two reasons:
- I regard the average intelligence of people visiting my site to be above average, and
- adding the text to the icons will kind of dilute the whole icon based navigation look.
Update 2 was the inclusion of the "recent stuff" thing you see on the right of the page. While I had planned to implement this for a while, I didn't really see the need for it till recently. Now that there are a few articles up in each section of the site, and with more on the way, it was time for including it. For now, the "recent stuff" area lists up to 5 recent updates to the site - usually the 2 before and 2 after the currently open article. This is not exactly the ideal functionality once the number of articles grows larger, but will do for now. Later, I will improve on this by displaying things like number of articles by month, number of articles by category (perhaps a tag cloud), 3 newest articles, and the current functionality. Along with a search box and link to an sortable index page, this should make finding stuff on the site really easy.
Finally, Update 3 for the weekend was the inclusion of the second episode of my robot escapades. This one was written sometime in 2005, but has been edited quite a bit because the original didn't read too well. Hope you like the new, improved version... check it out here: Starting trouble...
