15 February (Part 4) - This Website
Changes to Bonkers have continued during the past week and may have reached a
plateau, for the moment at least.
The presentation of 2015’s blog pages has been changed. The Menu (and some other
places) will now search for the most recent blog instead of me having to update
the link and sometimes forgetting to do so. You may see an ‘hourglass'.
The Index to blogs no longer exists as such, it is compiled on the fly from the
blog titles posted. This is a huge improvement because I will no longer
have to decide in advance whether there will be one, two or more blogs in a
single day as subsequently suffixing a blog with (Part 1) will no longer outdate
the Index and, much worse, outdate the RSS feed already posted.
For the user’s benefit the new Blog Index allows access to blogs on an
individual basis, or if the Month header is clicked will
assemble all the
month’s blogs into a single page. This was unnecessary under the old system as
the only option was a full month presentation.
All links back to earlier blogs (currently limited to 2015) will present that
blog as a single item whether the link back is from another single page blog or
from a composite month blog.
The red Info button that appears on banners has been disabled on Blog pages
because of bandwidth considerations which has lost the ‘Declutter facility’
which was within the Info panel. This is now replaced by the broom icons to the
right of the Menu. The red Info icon will be removed from Blog pages in due course
but as the facility is common to all pages - not just blogs - it is a bigger job
than it might look.
With the older system the banner image would often be topical to the blog
subject matter. That facility is retained but when not in use Banners appear on
full month pages only in a random fashion. Use the browser Refresh to test.
The changes have been introduced thanks to the considerable help of a friend
whose web skills are different to my own. To accommodate them significant
changes have been made to the underlying code especially in the Banner and Menu
areas. Potentially that could corrupt those areas and any page title immediately
below the Menu. It would be appreciated if those readers who have been quick to
bring mistakes to my attention in the past would keep a watchful eye on these areas in particular.
The new presentation also applies to 2009 Blogs and will be extended to other years
gradually, and probably slowly.
The revisions to image presentation, particularly in Mobile mode, is a different
issue entirely, and is not yet complete. It affects older pages almost at random.
The server breakdown during the week demonstrated that it is not too difficult
to keep Bonkers alive using www.bexley-is-bonkers.uk
so long as my own internet connection is not down too.