April Updates

I'm in the process of updating a few things on the site, which will make things better in the long run for both myself and for my readers. I'm also trying to figure out how to sort the menus for improving visibility of certain content.

Trying out Akismet: No more Turing challenge

You may have noticed that the "Verification" field is missing from the comment form. No, I didn't disable the anti-spam mechanism – rather, I switched to a transparent artificial-intelligence version that attempts to identify spam comments: Akismet. I'll keep it running for a few weeks and we'll see how effective it. If anything else, it removes the slightly-annoying equation you would otherwise need to solve.

Advertisements

You've no doubt noticed the "Ads by Google" boxes in the sidebar and above the comments of some pages (unless, of course, you have an ad blocker installed). The reason I have placed ads on a few pages is to help offset the cost of hosting and promoting Nookkin.com; I have no intentions of making Nookkin.com a money-making site and sacrificing content quality to achieve this. These are "harmless" text (and occasionally, image) ads; you should not get any annoying talking flash ads or anything that expands in any way.

Fixed index pages

Articles now have descriptions in the index pages, much like the blog entries. This is something that should have been there right away; don't ask me why I've been putting this off for so long.

Social bookmarking links updated

I've updated the "Add This" button and added my own tooltips to the icons; I've also added a dynamic Digg button. If you find an article or blog entry interesting, please share it!

NPS microsite updated

If you click Help > Update in NPS, you will notice that the page has changed slightly to reflect the move to push NPS 3.0 Alpha 2 out to as many users as possible for testing. A new design is in the works, and will probably launch when the NPS 3.0 Beta is released.

Should I do away with the Blog vs. Articles distinction?

Now a question for you readers: should I more or less merge the Blog and Articles section into one? My original logic for this was as follows: "Blog" for thoughts, my life, and site updates, all of which can logically be sorted by month and older ones be classified as "less important" than newer ones; "Articles" for content such as tutorials that are better sorted by category and which do not lose their relative importance with age. In this system, "How bitwise operators work" is undoubtedly an article; "The weather this April" is undoubtedly a blog entry.

Do you think it's working, or do you think I should do away with it? I haven't categorized my articles yet, simply because there aren't all that many of them right now.