Sunday, March 18, 2012

A few small changes to the blog...

"Read More" links

I discovered Blogger has an easy-to-use way of putting a "Read More>>" link in a post to break it up, so I've decided to use it. (If you're wondering, just put "<!--more-->", without the quotes, in the html at the desired point)

This should make it easier to skim the main page and search results. I found on other blogs, really long posts with lots of photos made it hard to find what I was looking for because it was hard to tell posts apart.

I get to choose whether and where to put the break, so I'm only breaking up posts with four or more photos, with some exceptions (so, for example, all of the Single photo posts are unbroken). So far I've edited old posts back to the beginning of 2011.

The main goal here is to make the blog easier to read and use, not to drive up page views. I could also have the RSS feed only show content that comes before the break, but I've left to show the full post (so the full post will still show at Blogawa.ca.

Feel free to leave feedback on whether you like/dislike how I've implemented this.

Redirect to centretown.blogspot.ca

Blogger now automatically redirects from centretown.blogspot.com to centretown.blogspot.ca. I didn't do this, I don't like it, and I can't disable it.

The best you can do is add /ncr (no country redirect) after the ".com" when typing the address to prevent it for the current session. Searching for the "Singles" label would thus be "http://centretown.blogspot.com/ncr/search/label/Singles". More info on this change is on this blogger support page.

I don't plan to go back and edit every single link in every post to add the "/ncr", much as I wish to.

More frequent posts?

Now that I've started posting weekly pedestrian-themed posts with my Peds on Weds posts, and with the 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West (technically outside Centretown!), I'm considering adding another regular posting day, though I'm not sure which.

The Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing started with the similar nine-part series on the reconstruction of the T&L building and stuck, even if it means many posts are fluffy Singles posts. Stay tuned, maybe I will!

2 comments:

  1. You don't need to add the NCR redirect. Google will redirect automatically.

    However, the reason Google is doing this is censorship. By giving each country its own domain it makes it easier to block out blogs from entire regions.

    I also don't like this at all.

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    Replies
    1. If I want to stay at .com (which I must if I want to be able to see the "edit" button on my posts, since the editor cookie is at blogger.com—blogger.ca forwards to google.ca), I have to use the /ncr. NCR stands for "No country redirect".

      I'm fine with Google fighting censorship, but making this change unilaterally with no notice, no opt out, and incompletely, is what annoys me.

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