Saturday, October 28, 2006
Site News: "Today In Iraq" is getting a makeover
Greetings :-),
Some time ago Matt asked on behalf of the editors for somebody with web coding skills to contact him with a view to fixing the various bugs in the code for this blog and give the place a general make over.
As I've a lot of experience in the field and for a while was a lecturer in the topic, I volunteered, and am now the site administrator.
I'm developing a new site structure for "Today in Iraq" and at this point the code is sufficiently bug free that I'm running it in parallel at this location:
I plan on running the parallel site for about a month. Thereafter I'll migrate the code to here and republish "Today In Iraq" so that it takes on its new structure and appearance. You should notice several improvements to the site:- It copes with a wider number of screen resolutions.
- Internet Explorer users will no longer have to resize their view port to see the entire page.
- The text should be more readable.
- The design is liquid and uses font size relative metrics. - What that particular piece of gobbledygook means is that people who use properly written browsers (such as Firefox, or Opera,) can adjust the text on their screen to a size that suits their eyesight and lighting conditions and their browser will automatically adjust what is on their screen to meet their requirements.
- Sight impaired users and blind users should also find the site much more usable (this is a particular passion of mine.)
- People who visit the site using PDAs and mobile 'phones should also find the site much more usable.
- The site is structured so that each posting has its own page.
- There is a listing of the most recent postings to the top of the screen.
- I also plan on adding a search facility to the blog using a google search box.
- The presentation of the information is also improved and the editors have available to them a wider range of ways of presenting it.
The aim is that the place should have the "look and feel" of a professional news site.
I'll be staying on as site admin after the "new look" is launched. Partly to provide on-going assistance to the editors, and partly to make sure that when blogger.com launch their new version 2.0 of blogspot that there's as little dispruption as possible to the readers and editors.
markfromireland
