Some simple geek pleasures I've been indulging in (or rather, some slightly complex pleasures...)

• Redid almost all the site using <div>s instead of tables, so all formatting and layout is now done using pure CSS, and some other tidy ups with I was at it. This gives:

  • Much better accessiblity - using HTML correctly

  • Better speed - the parts of the page are loaded in the correct order. With the CSS I've chosen it even means the browser can start displaying the main content much sooner.

  • Much easier to change in future

• Added pingback to the blog, both client and server. Most of the code is Perl, from Ian Hixie, adapted to my needs. Getting it to work was a bit of a mare, not least because my web host gives totally unscrutable error messages when perl scripts don't work.

  Of course, I have no idea if this feature will ever be used - most of the big blogging systems don't seem to support pingback. But trackback was too complicated to implement, and seems too hacky anyway (e.g. embedded RDF).

• I became a member of the League of Reformed Bloggers, the blogroll is on my sidebar. This also has lead to yet another an increase in blogs I read!

• Added server side caching of my two blogrolls, both of which are collected from remote URLs, to speed up the site.

• Spent some time spying on my visitors (log sniffing), to find, amongst other things:

  • When the Bloglines bot fetches RSS feeds, it tells you the number of subscribers in the Referrer string, which is quite considerate of it I thought.

  • My KDE articles are getting a reasonable number of hits from Google searches on different KDE features, which is nice to know.

Now, to go and get a life...

Update - also added Trackback. This post is now officially my test post for testing out all these things