...and we're back! Sorry, some technical difficulties kept us from the air for about 2 days.
...and we're back! Sorry, some technical difficulties kept us from the air for about 2 days.
Lots of small improvements to the GUI, chief among them: new side ornaments for eemadges. They're a bit more extravagant but I like them a lot. The flowers take the color of the border!
500+ eemadges! Yeeeeey! To celebrate such a landmark I finally upgraded the website to lighttpd and am loving every minute of it; forget Godspeed, this is Google-speed! (To the uninitiated, lighttpd is a server, the program that "serves" you eemadges' webpages, and what the upgrade means for you is a much, much faster experience.)
At last, the culprit has been found! I'd been very, very, restless for some days because the tags (and later the comments) disappeared twice for no reason at all. The first time I thought they were just wiped all of a sudden, but the 2nd time I started to notice that the disappearance was gradual. Luckily, I'd some backups, but it was all very disquieting. Today I finally discovered the culprit: Google Web Accelerator.
As you may have heard, there's a controversy about the very dangerous way that GWA speeds up your browsing experience: by prefetching every damn link! Since I used to have tags deleted through plain old links, GWA-users were unadvertent disinformation bombs as they roamed through my website. It was particularly irritating and disappointing that this all came from Google... Google! IMHO it's just plain evil (and yeah, I know that such links are somewhy unorthodox but they are a very real de facto practice, and for a good reason: they serve a need!).
Anyway, the worst thing about losing the tags was that adding them used to be a real pain in the ass. You had to add one tag at a time, and everytime you added one the entry field disappeared until it heard back from the server. I finally got sick and tired of this and gave the tag-engine a much needed boost. Now it works just like in Flickr (talent imitates, genius steals): you can add several tags at the same time (separating them with spaces) and the entry field is always available.
It is incredible how much smoother the whole process is now, so much in fact that I ended up with several eemadges suddenly lopsided with a hundred or so tags. My solution, for the moment, is an ultra-chic ellipsis that shortens the tag list whenever there are 20 or more tags; clicking the ellipisis makes the list display full size. I think that's pretty dandy, but lately a more intriguing idea has started to surface: an asimetric layout for pages of individual eemadges!
New logo! Taking advantage of the new compact eemadge definition (↓see below post↓), I wanted to give the old logo a little twist. The homepage now has "beautiful descriptions" in 4 different places; why plaster the place with it? First, because strange as it may seem people can be unbelievably absent-minded when browsing; second, because most people now reaching the website arrive at the page of an individual eemadge and often they don't even visit the homepage; I want them to leave with some idea of what this website is all about: beautiful descriptions.
I finally relented to a concise definition: an eemadge is a beautiful description. Henceforward this is the official party line, superseding the previous one: an eemadge as a vivid and original description. I've had to come a long, long way to come to such a pithy statement, and I believe it explains inmediately and with great clarity what an eemadge is.
Goodbye cover image! Many people complained that the image got too much focus, and some newbies were confused about what the website was about when they first arrived (thinking for instance that this was a website "for describing photos"); the main reason for taking it away though, is that the homepage, and really all of this website, is in the middle of a major overhaul and I can't think of a good place for the cover image.
The main thing that will be changing is information density; now, for instance, I display the 20 most recent eemadges instead of just the last 10 as I used to. Why more density? Because through time, this website has started to gain some pretty cool content and I wouldn't want you to miss it. Listening to Edward Tufte (and reading him) has made me rethink many of my previous misconceptions about the relation between simplicity, usability, and information density. As he himself likes to say, high information density is genuinely interactive (I further elaborate on this on my blog, in Spanish).
Expect big changes in the pages of each individual eemadge. Since most people now arrive through such pages to the website (usually from a search engine), they should also serve as introductions and enticers to all the content that's inside. Expect more lists of eemadges that are somehow related with the current one, I've some pretty cool ideas in this regard.
Some interesting queries people use to get here:
Finally! A cover image! I've been wanting to add an image to the main page for ages now but I always worried about stinking copyright. Then it hit me: Wikimedia Commons!. It goes somewhat against my "all attention to the eemadges"-policy but it looks gorgeous. A minor frame bug was corrected too.
The "frame" for individual eemadges has changed beyond all recognition. The main complain I had with the old one was that it seemed the text looked much longer than it was; it was visually intimadating, just a monolithic chunk. The new design addresses this problem by coloring only the actual eemadge text and pushing everything else to the background.
, and placed it more in context.