site update
The 5th anniversary of onderhond.com is only a month away. I've always considered this site a combination of personal content and professional playground, so to celebrate this special birthday I've planned a couple of updates, most of which will hopefully have made it by the end of the year. This little update will give you a taste of what is to come (and a small warning that some things might break in the process though I'm aiming to keep the site running as smoothly as possible).
three blogs become one
The first change is already visible today. Yesterday I closed down two subsections of my blog: the personal and work section. Fear not, the separation between the two will continue to exist (I still firmly believe in separating the content of my work and personal blog), but the urls are gone (currently all old urls are redirected to their new destination, so all incoming links will continue to work). You can still filter on personal/work posts in the overview lists and archive (not yet implemented), but eventually they will all lead to the same page.
The benefits are clear: one blob of content now has one unique url (instead of two), something search engines appreciate a lot. It also clears up some room in the main navigation and the color coding finally becomes section-specific instead of a mix of sections and subsections. All in all, I hope the site structure becomes a bit clearer while keeping the functionality of the split-topic blogs intact.
introducing a new section: features
One of the biggest changes is the introduction of a brand new site section. Through the years I've written many blog posts, but there are even more posts I didn't write. Some because I forgot (it happens sometimes), some because they didn't really fit the current blog format.
My posts tend to be quite large because page layouts dictate them to be large. This means that I don't have any place to publish smaller blobs of content. The new "features" section will hopefully fill this hole. A feature is a topic with a selection of smaller (2-3 paragraph) updates nested beneath. The difference with a normal article is that you will get a list of all updates on a single feature page. This will allow me to share little css tricks or quick film tips (the ones that didn't get a review but are still worth a bother) among other things.
top movies: expanded
The Top 100 movies section will also be expanded. Instead of sticking to 100 films, I'll be expanding the list 10 films at a time. It'll be an ongoing project and I'm not sure where I'll end up with it, but for now I wouldn't be surprised to see the list grow to 250 entries in the coming 2 years, possibly even holding all my 4.5*/5.0* rated films. The sky is the limit, though I realize I should be looking into ways to make the entire list a bit easier to scan (if you have to click through 250 films with the current pager it's going to be hell).
responsive
Currently I've implemented a pretty simple responsive design (basically some repositioning of existing elements). I might tweak the design to be more responsive-ready, though I'm not quite sure how far I'm going to get with that. I'm not a designer (at all), so it could just as well be that I'm going to postpone the redesign until a later date. Chances are that the redesign won't be purely visual either, but that it will also include some structural changes.
conclusion
So that's about all of it I think. Quite a few updates planned for a rather short period of time, but the back-end work is actually minimal and most of it can be done without writing a lot of extra code. The biggest uncertainty is the redesign, the rest of the updates should be visible by the end of this year if everything goes to plan.