Good things come in threes: Tweaking always

Manufactured Environments is an active, living site. I’m often looking for better and newer ways to code things on the site. I made three tweaks to the site today that I wanted to give you the lowdown (down low?) on.

1. tags: the functionality of the tags that you see at the end of most posts on ManuEnvi has changed. I decided to take advantage of some new Movable Type functionality in version 3.3. Previously, the tags were links to that tag’s page at Technorati.com. Now they are internal. Clicking on a tag will give you a list of posts here that are marked with that tag. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of a given tag. So if you want to subscribe to all the entries that are tagged linux, you can. There’s also a compendium of all the tags used on ManuEnvi. It’s a long list, which is because I’ve used tags in the past to indicate what is unique about a post, rather than using it as a substitute for categories. That behavior may change.
2. archives: the extensive archives needed some simplification. There had been JavaScript drop-downs over in the right-hand column that allowed you to view the archives from various years by month. This has been eliminated in favor of a centralized archives page. Under the archives section there is only one link. The archives page has been enhanced—at the top, you’ll see a complete list of all the months that Manufactured Environments has been in action, going back to February 2000. Below that is a complete list of all the entries by title. So you have two ways of finding old entries: either by month, or by individual entry. Here is a link to the archives.
3. fonts: the display of the entire website on Linux has been improved. I wasn’t happy with the way the fonts looked on Linux. The fonts used in the CSS file had been mostly optimized for Windows. I made some changes including Andale Sans for sans serif areas, and Nimbus Roman No9 L for the serif blog text and comments text. That definitely improves the display of ManuEnvi on my SUSE Linux box, and hopefully those fonts will work for your Linux box as well. (You may want to install OpenOffice.org if you haven’t.)