craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

I'm irked by some of the usability problems with my website right now, but I don't have time to do anything about them yet. (But hey, at least I got my S3 interface to work and can host high-quality video now!) I do, however, have time to blog about what needs fixing :-) It's probably not good form to call attention to the weaknesses of your website, but at least this way I get kind of a "to-do list" out there, and I can offer a few workarounds.

1. Search doesn't work. This one is entirely my fault: there was a perfectly functional search option before, but I took it out in favour of this Google one that potentially can generate some revenue. The problem? Google can't figure out how to index my site! So no matter what you search for, you'll get no results! I thought they had smart people working there? I won't get into the technical factors that make my site less than trivial to index (although it still is trivial, Google), but the solution is for me to put the old search widget back on. I'll get around to it soon.

2. There's no forward/backward navigation. The only way to go forward and back on the site is with the little arrows on the calendar. This takes you forward and back month-by-month, but since there are twenty stories per page, and typically less than twenty articles per month, this style of navigation has a lot of annoying overlaps. I should have a "Older posts" link at the bottom of the page that directly displays the next twenty posts.

3. Categories cannot be browsed. That is, even when browsing by category, there are only twenty stories displayed on a page at a time. But I've been blogging for so long now, that many of my categories have more than twenty entries in them. So if you click on, say /Personal/France, you won't see my awesome article about the Braderie, and there's no way to get to the second page of France articles! Combined with the search not working, this is pretty annoying. My hypothetical "Older posts" button should also handle categories.

4. My hierarchical categories, aren't. My category names imply a hierarchy, and I wanted them to work that way. So by clicking on /Personal you'd get everything in Personal as well as France, Gaming, and Fatherhood stuff, or if you wanted you could limit things to a sub-category. That doesn't work; I had originally wanted to modify the code for the website to make it work the way I wanted, but it would probably be better to just re-name my categories. If I haven't gotten around to it in the last two years I'm probably not going to any time soon.

5. RSS is broken I think this happened when I started putting up Chinese articles. Maybe the character set keeps the feed from being generated or read properly. I ought to figure out what's going on here, though, because the RSS feeds used to work fine in Firefox, and they haven't for quite a while now.

So, there is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to this blog. Inevitably, though, whenever I have some time to work on my websites, getting new photos posted to James' site, or editing new movies, has to take the highest priority. If anyone is in the mood for a walk down memory lane, though, clicking on this link will take you back to the very first month of this site's existence, and by reading from the bottom to the top and then moving forward month by month, you can read all of the old content.

I just don't know why Google can't figure that out :-)