I spent this afternoon implementing a new abstract overview of this site’s contents at the root. It’s an effort to break away from the essentially time-only perspective previously forced on the reader and instead to provide different perspectives for exploring content from all different times.
It may be worth noting that I haven’t tested it in IE yet. That will have to come later.
Along with this new abstract is a “lifestream” — all of my actions on other sites around the web. Jeremy had the idea first and Ted followed up with a Planet Venus implementation, which I mimicked. For those interested, I have a cron job that kicks off a bourne shell script that runs planet.py with my config file which then grabs updated feeds from multiple sources and uses the Django templating system to render the results into a snippet of HTML on disk which is then slurped up by PHP into my WordPress theme file which is finally sent as a full HTML page to the browser. There is also caching at almost every level of that process.
Right now the Eventful feed has incorrect dates on its items and I’m only showing the “latest 10” items in the stream. I’ll likely expand the lifestream into its own section without limits in the near future.
Update (2007-03-13):
Sam Ruby fixed the problem that Planet Venus had consuming Eventful Atom feeds. So now Eventful events that I’m watching or going to appear in my lifestream with the correct date and everything. Hooray.
I tested the layout in IE 7 and Opera 9 — it’s somewhat broken in both. Laziness and apathy toward IE put that fix way down on my priority list. Feel free to give me a quick CSS patch to fix it, though. :P
Here’s a screen shot of the new abstract for posterity:
This is totally awesome. I have been thinking about the same, but only *thinking* about it. You are actually moving forward to do something about it! Bravo. I anxious await your progress.