…will be resumed shortly.
Apologies for the lack of updates over the last couple of weeks; things have been busy.
I’ve got a raft of updates coming soon; I’ll be introducing a review feed so you don’t have to see rubbish like this appearing in your RSS reader of choice. I’m also planning to make it easier to find the RSS link (it’s over there…on the right…down a bit…got it!), and to provide an explanation of RSS for those that perhaps haven’t yet been introduced to its wonders.
In terms of reviews, I’ve got Chocolate and Incident On And Of A Mountain Road from the Masters of Horror series, X-Men 3, and I’ve even suffered the horrors of Andre The Butcher, so you don’t have to. I’ve got two Doctor Who reviews coming, and hopefully a third after tonight. And to top it all off I’m going to a preview showing of Hard Candy on Monday, so that’ll be up asap too.
So, much to come - just bear with me while I sort all this tedious work stuff out and things will be back on track before you know it.
I’ve made a couple of noteworthy changes to the site:
I've been reading about tags vs categories for a while now. Lorelle is a big fan of The Ultimate Tag Warrior - a Wordpress plugin which makes the creation and management of a tag based site (or folksonomy) less painful. I'd like to say easier, but transitioning from categories to tags when you've already got a reasonable amount of content isn't. It's not exactly hard either - it's just not something you can leap into without a bit of thought.
As a starting point, I had a look at Technorati and discovered that of the 100 most popular tags, there are only really a handful of top level ones that I write about. Things like Apple, Film, Music etc. Of course, there is a level of variation within these categories, for example any piece of content written about Apple could also be classed as Mac, Apple Mac, iBook, iMac, and more. Film could be film, films, movies, flicks, dvds: you get the idea.
Tags are intended to provide additional information about a post or piece of content. I like to think of it as meta-information, although that's probably just the geek in me. Tags enrich the pool of information you're searching through and hopefully make the search for that information easier. My view is that they're also useful for adding additional contextual information to a post. So, to use my recent Hills Have Eyes review as an example: its new category will be Reviews, plain and simple. Previously it fell under film, horror, and review. With a tag based approach I could use tags like remake, gore, horror, Aja, Craven etc. It appears (in the context of the web) to be more "acceptable", and my own view is that it's more usable, to apply large numbers of tags and fewer categories. My thinking behind the acceptability of tags is that this approach provides the reader with a choice: Do I want to chose from a larger selection of "meta" data about this post, or do I just want to know what its reason for being is? And so that's how it all sits in my mind: Reason for being = Categories, meta or contextual information about a post = Tags. A reader can then browse through my site either by moving from post to post via tags (so each post would be quite closely related) or by categories (which would take a broader view of posts with a similar intention or origin).
A site redesign has been on the cards for a while. I was never entirely happy with the layout of the previous version of Is There Food; it was entirely too boxy for my liking. After reading an article on the holy grail of css layouts over at A List Apart, I decided I would totally reinvent the site. I'd create a new banner, a new layout, and I'd do it from scratch. I would be intimately acquainted with the css that drives my site, and I would feel like a real man.
But why reinvent the wheel? The layout I was working towards wasn't entirely unlike many that had gone before, and I was experiencing the maddening consequences of a multiple browser world first hand. Oh I've always been aware of them, and I've butted heads with them in the past, but I've never gone to war with them. And little old me versus the mutated css nightmares that exist in the great "out there" was a losing battle.
Enter K2. Not the mountain, but the glorious Wordpress template framework. K2 is a wonderful thing, allowing you to concentrate on skinning the site, while it takes care of most of the layout problems. It also adds a variety of nice features, like the live search (go and start typing something into the search bar…I'll wait). And by all accounts there's more to come. The end result isn't dramatically different from what existed before; I've moved the sidebar to the right, and added a few features. The font has changed, and I've tweaked some of the borders on things. Despite that, I think the changes are significant. The site feels far less boxy, and far more open. I may tweak a little more over the next few days, but I wanted to make the changes live now.
Here's a few of the new things I've added:
Archive - My thoughts on archives: Why invest significant amounts of sidebar space on something that the vast majority of visitors will never use? If a visitor is actually looking for your archive, they won't mind an extra click to get there. Thanks to the Extended Live Archive plugin, I've shifted all the archive functionality off onto its own page. Much cleaner, if you ask me.
I'm seriously thinking about giving the site a new look; I think I'm bored with this one…
I've created some potential banners here. If you read this and you have any thoughts on good ones, bad ones, or ideas please post a comment.
I've just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 beta 1.
Yes, I do like living dangerously.
If anything looks horribly wrong, or doesn't work, or eats your pets, please let me know. Hopefully, the site won't eat your pets, but hey, this is beta, right?
