A few more site improvements

Over the weekend, I spent a little time tidying things up a bit. Honestly, I think this has been the longest run for me and a single site. It turns out, a few of the original design ideas don’t really fit anymore; namely the archives and tags. Originally, both sections had a vertical list that had nothing to prevent them from reaching the core of the earth. For the archives, I’m now letting you view titles for a specific month. And by not loading all of the archives at once, it seems to help slightly on load time. As for the tags, the same problem existed. Plus, it wasn’t feasible to have them spread 750px (or so) away from their corresponding entry count. I’m debating an optional tag cloud view, mainly for two reasons: 1) that sort of visual understanding of the common topics may be useful (I’m kind of curious as to what it might look like) and 2) a tag cloud would be a good way to practice more Ruby code, as I’ve never written one explicitly.

And last but not least, I’ve finally found some time to incorporate the Syntax library. And I owe Chris Scharf for that (via his implementation)—thanks, Chris. For Textile, I had originally written a view helper to convert the text from the database at the instance of the view (to_html(content)). But after reading Chris’ post, I started using the before_save callback to save out the textilized text into another column. It’s much cleaner to say post.body and post.body_html depending on which one I need, rather than wrapping a helper around it each and every time. Plus it works nicely for Syntax, too. If you use Chris’ method, you should give credit back to him for posting how he did it. And while I’m in confession, I’ve temporarily adopted his CSS for the highlighting; I really do plan on changing it, though. In due time, I suppose.