post 250

what's been done

Several small things have been added these last couple of months. The most visible of these additions is probably the ie6 stats graph on the homepage. Depending on my referring sites stats the graph nears the 0.5% mark, but it will definitely be a while before I can bid farewell to my ie6 css. For those of you wondering how these stats are generated and shown, I'm still planning on writing an article about just that but for some reason I can't seem to get around to actually writing it.

Another, more recent addition is the share block on the articles page. In the bottom right corner of the article is a little box containing links to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Technorati (which I will probably change to Digg later on). Some of you might be surprised by this addition, as I've been quite outspoken about my dislike of these services. Thing is, they do work and since reaching readers is the primary goal of this blog, it would be silly to completely ignore these options.

A third major change is of course the addition of the ie6 css fixer. I'm still waiting to develop a separate "Tools" section until I/we actually have a second tool to add, but that is certainly a possibility for the future. The ie6 css fixer itself is doing good and should receive another small update in the next couple of weeks (though it will probably be a bit later still), so keep checking for updates.

Another nice extra that might have been overlooked is the notification of articles being available in other languages. It's not something that happens every day, but when I do find them (thank you Google Analytics) I think it's valuable to add as people might feel more comfortable reading this stuff in their native language. Mind that these articles are not translated by me, so the accuracy and quality of the translation is dependent on other sources I have no control over.

Final update is the addition of article stats. I've chosen to add a little transparency to my blog by adding the reader stats of each article for all to see. Of course they are untampered with, as you will clearly notice on the less popular articles. More about that process can be found in the site stats for all to see article.

what's coming

The first big thing that's coming is a long, long vacation. I'll be gone for a good three weeks, so updates will be extremely scarce, if not actually non-existent. That's still two weeks away though, so there will still be a couple of updates the next couple of days.

As for updates to the blog itself, I still need to have good look at the gallery overview page, which is hardly functional right now. Using javascript tabs wasn't such a smart idea after all. I'm also considering to rework the blog html to html5, though I'll have to see how much trouble that will give me with ie6 and other, older browsers.

And finally some small visual touches here and there. Won't be doing much work on the html of the site itself, but the css could use some cleaning up and some parts could benefit from some accentuation.

250 more to come

I guess that's it for the first 250 articles on onderhond.com. I'm still not tired of blogging, so I'm pretty sure the next 250 will be just as quick to arrive as the first batch. It's a hell of a job keeping a blog going, but at the same time it's quite fun, and it keeps you busy during lunch break!

Here's to hoping the next 250 will be just as fun, and to the progress of this blog.