Daily pictures for this year
I had thought that today I'll have time to continue with updating the site. Well, now it is half past four in the evening, so it is not so very late. But I spent most of the daylight hours doing physical work outdoors, so now I feel a bit too tired to properly concentrate on coding. I cut today's site updates to the minimum; as promised, I started a fresh series of Picture of The Day.
You can use the main menu to navigate to pictures, then from the sidebar navigation menu choose the new 2017 picture album. But that's a lot of clicks, so to make it simpler www.enormouselk.com/pictures/picture-day/latest should always take you directly to the latest picture of the day. Maybe I'll add that link also on the blog header, but I won't do it today, as I'd like to rewrite the way the header is generated in the code. I'd like to have easily customizable headers for every main section of the site. So I'll keep that on my do-to list =)
Small things to mention; as you might notice, I added a short description under the picture of the day. No more need to hover mouse over the image to view the description. Also, to keep the process simple, I think this time I won't be posting each and every picture on twitter. I think I'll occasionally post some pictures on twitter, when I feel like that, and when the picture is somehow especially silly, funny or interesting. I will take a picture every day for the year 2017, and typically I should be able to post the pictures on daily basis. But if it so happens that for a day or two I'm away from the internet, then I'll post the missing pictures as soon as I can.
Tomorrow I have a rather long day of work, so it will probably be late evening before I get to post the 2nd of January picture =) Hehe, well, but now I'll go heat up the sauna.
All of my best wishes for this new year, everybody!
EDIT: Oops, after posting this I noticed that the "newer / older" links above the picture of the day are counting all the pictures in all the sub-albums under the main category 'picture of the day'. Which, at the moment, means that you can browse back to the previous series, too. That was not intended, but maybe I'll leave it like that for a while. When the fresh 2017 series grows to have some more content, I will see if it better to have the newer / older links to be restricted to the album one is currently browsing.
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Cool. :) And Happy New Year! :D
I guess it is probably too much trouble (I know it would be for me, haha), but it would be handy if the comments and pictures also went into the RSS feed, rather than just the blog posts.
As it stands, I just have a bookmark to your site in the same folder as the "recent posts" links and such for the discussion forums I participate in, and load them all with a middle click whenever it is time to see "what is new". This ends up being several times per day, so I am sure it throws off your website stats a bit too, hehe.
I mean, I don't think it's a big deal or anything, and I am certainly not complaining. Just thought I'd mention it is all. :)
PS: Hmm, is there not an RSS feed? I could have sworn I was using one here for a little while, but now going back to look for it again I am not finding it, hehe.
I think there should be an RSS feed - there's the icon on top right corner of the "blog entries" menu.
Hmmm, it is a long time since I set up the RSS feed, so on top of my head I can't remember what kind of options it has in the configuration. Anyhow, since I'm not using RSS that much myself, I'm not familiar with the ways people like to use it. So any feedback is welcome.
In an earlier comment an another user suggested including both blog headlines and contents in the RSS feed. Just to make it sure I get my user feedback correctly - would that conflict with the way you'd like to use RSS? I mean, when you say "if the comments and pictures also went into the RSS feed", it means not only picture titles but the actual pictures themselves? Which sounds a lot like including the blog text in the feed.
Hehe, I always thought that RSS is text only, but I'll take a look if there is an easy way to include pictures in the feed.
My use of RSS feeds is with Firefox's "live bookmarks", to notify me when there is new content on a blog or podcast that I follow. Mostly podcasts; yours is the only blog that I really actually follow much.
So the podcasts don't have a comments section I guess, and I don't really know how most blogs' RSS feeds are set up, though I have my website set up to push out notifications for both new blog entries and comments, as well as new pages and page changes. I am using dokuwiki for my CMS though, and that's just kind of how it works out of the box.
I recall that when I was subscribed to your RSS feed, that I was seeing notifications for each of your new blog entries, but I was missing a lot of interesting content in the comments and photo album, as they weren't pushing notifications into the feed. That's why I went back to just checking the page manually (and had forgotten about the photo album until this blog post, lol).
Personally, I don't use an aggregator or RSS reader or anything like that though. I don't actually read the content within the RSS, just the titles. I just use it for new content notifications, and then I go to the page linked to in the feed entry and read it (or listen) in the browser like normal.
OK, thanks for the clarifications! Yes, firefox's live bookmark is the only way I use RSS myself - for the latest headlines supplied by the British Broadcasting Corporation aka BBC. Just the way you describe, browsing a list of headlines, and then clicking on the interesting ones to read the actual content on the BBC website.
I think with the CMS I'm using it should be pretty simple to set up a separate feed for comments, and one for pictures, too. So then it probably is just one further step to create a 'super feed' to include them all. Well, I'll take a look at this when I have more time to concentrate on the technical side. Also I'd guess it is possible to set up several feeds so that people can choose which one they want to subscribe to.
Hip hip hooray for the Picture Of The Day come back :D It was a lot of fun to follow it the last time, nice start for this new year! :D
I've been working on site updates, and there still are a few things I'd like to get done before posting a blog entry about the updates. So, for now I'll drop a short comment on RSS so you can experiment and possibly write feedback.
Here is a feed which shows all new content on the site (except comments, I haven't yet figured out a way to do that).
Here is an another feed which shows all new comments on the site.
So, maybe I could figure a way to make a super-feed merging those two feeds? But I don't know yet which would be the best way to do it.
Also, this is still only titles / comment clips as links. There are configuration options to include the actual content in the feed also. But I haven't yet examined if I could adjust the settings per feed, so that there would be one feed for links only, and another feed with titles + content.
Anyhow, I thought to post this comment now, so people can take a look and comment if the new rss feeds are anything sort of usable.
Cool.
Hehe, there's something I don't yet quite understand in RSS generation =)
For, it generates the recent content feed based on this page which includes things like comment count and even a direct link to new comments. I tried to get those included in the RSS feed but to no avail. Or, then it is that the Firefox livebookmark-thing can't handle it. Maybe I should try with a separate RSS reader. Tomorrow, for it is already midnight now =)
EDIT at half past midnight =) I found a simple way to include the latest comment for each entry. But this is this only in the above linked page view - seems like the comment is not included in the RSS feed.
Nope, one more test for tonight. Actually, it was pretty simple to add another feed with different settings.
This feed shows the full content of ten latest entries. But no comments. Well, more tomorrow or some other day.
I wish I knew more and could offer more helpful suggestions. :( I don't really know anything about the innards of RSS, though. On my site, I am just using dokuwiki's built-in RSS feed, which by default include anything and everything that happens to the site's content. Then I have to figure out regular expressions to exclude the stuff that I don't want in the feed.
Well, but you have an user experience =) So, do you find it too clumsy if there are two feeds - one for content, another for comments. Or is it too much trouble having to subscribe to two separate feeds?
This site runs on Drupal, and it seems to store comments differently than normal content. The way it is built, there doesn't seem to be an out-of-the-box way to build a list of both content and comments sorted by time. To figure this out, I'd need to dig deeper into the inner workings of the framework, either finding an easy way to combine two feeds into one, or then just writing my own code for it (in which case I'd also need to study a bit more of RSS, if I'm going to write a piece of code generating a feed.) At the moment all of this might take more time than I feel like investing into it. So if it is not too much trouble for users, then I'll go forward with separate feeds, and improve the system later on.
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