Neil Duffin Blog

I’ve updated the blog code today, making several changes…

• The RSS feed, main blog post list, archive view and search now use ‘excerpts’ to make the list of posts easier to navigate. Before this, one post could extend down most of the page and make it difficult to see any new posts.
• The format of the Google Adverts has been changed. I’ve noticed some insanely bad advertising on this site, seemingly because the only text being scanned was the banner. Since this only really contains my name, it resulted in adverts for ‘Duffman consumes’ and ‘Neil Diamond’s latest album’. Not really that relavant to a blog about technology and photography!

Only time will tell if the adverts get any more useful but they should remain devoid of any annoying, animated rubbish that seems to plague so many sites on the ‘net.

I hope you find the blog easier to navigate as a result of the changes but if you really, really hate it and have a better idea or spot a problem, then drop me a line.

Update

A minor issue was spotted with the < strong > tags not being correctly closed in excerpts. This has now been fixed.

It occurred because I use ‘eregi‘ to match the tags and seemingly this function does not like the regex terms \s, \w, \d.

These are supposed to match ‘whitespaces’, ‘alphanumeric characters’ and ‘digits’ respectively. I was using \s but it seems to match ‘\’ and ’s’ instead of whitespaces.

Long story, short - use ‘[ \n\r\t]’ instead of ‘\s’ in eregi, see this bit on the PHP site.

I also took the opportunity to make the system process lists as well. So the excerpt for this post will now be better formatted in the main blog list, search and archive.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 3:15 pm and is filed under News, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.