Tonight I have been trying to complete the layout of the Spitfire Site News and make other minor layout refinements.

After a month or so of posting, news section grew with sufficiently many articles to make the older ones disappear and become difficult to find again. The purpose of the change is therefore easier navigation and providing better organized archive pages.

As you can see at this very page, there is now a sidebar along its right edge which provides quick links to older posts and monthly archives. The archive pages have been reworked and provide an overview with links to all posts in the actual month.

Another novelty is the addition of category labels for each news post. At the bottom of this one you should see "Labels: webmaster" which indicates that this post is about technical development of the site. A link allows you to quickly access other posts on this subject. This way you will be able to browse only recent site updates, videos or history articles in Spitfire Site News. I still have a little bit to go to make this feature really usable. For example, Blogger may provide a RSS feed separately for each category (see this example for history articles). Neat.

Comments to posts have also been reformatted so that they are easier to read.

Blogger is great stuff, even if I'm missing several important features in it, such as ability to browse directly to next / previous post (invaluable for photoblogs) and better support for categorizing of posts.

The reason that I spend so much time learning and developing page templates in Blogger is that I intend to use it for other purposes in the near future. A library of archive photos or videos, for example, seems to be feasible application of the same basic functionality, and I intend to give it a serious try rather than developing static pages by hand. I will keep you posted.

Last but not least, another reflection from the webmaster workshop - presence on Google. You may think that things are happening very fast on the Internet, but I can assure you that not all of them do. When starting up a new website such as this, no experience is more agonizing than waiting for the Googlebot (Google's indexing robot) to start indexing the site properly. Not to mention other search engines. Googlebot just seems not to care about new sites, even if they are interlinked with others, and it can take months before it decides to start visiting the site with any frequency worth noting.

Two days ago a breakthrough has been made: Googlebot was here at Spitfire Site, for the first time since the beginning of August (!) when the entire site was basically a prototype. I sure hope I will see it here more often.

Labels: webmaster