I’ve never been too excited about the look of my tag cloud. I have a lot of old tags that are single digits—or worse, 1. Now that I have some categories that are an order of magnitude higher, most of the fonts are tiny with little variation.
To fix the issue, I reworked the calculations. That tags are now ranked by popularity instead of just using the count. This provides a better progression to the scale which looks good, even as tags continue to grow.
Unfortunately this also equalized the tag cloud in the footer. To compensate, I added another parameter to set maximum font size. On a positive note, this allowed me size up the fonts in the tag cloud view. Overall, a positive change.
I made some minor changes today to the ZX81 web helpers. This is for the functions like listing a program, running it in an emulator, or listing the assembly code. I discovered that the canonical URL in the listing page was pointing to the wrong link. Fixing that, I decided to align the three helpers to work similar to the emulator page. You will now see the primary image, if set, a title, and a synopsis. I also added a link to the article if one exists.
Apparently I had broken my feeds. Reviewing my site in Feedly, I noticed that my RSS feeds stopped working. After some digging, I found where I’d accidentally removed the self closing tag required by XML. I had done some cleaning up of those tags over the break to make the code valid HTML5 since reverting from XHTML. Sadly, I completely missed that the RSS feeds still used XML. Funny how a single slash caused so much pain.
Following up from my last update, the site now has consistent article views to the top page news. Underneath the hood, I broke out the common routines and integrated the same theme calls. This not only provides a consistent look, but should carry forward if I ever update the theme. I need to clean up and optimize the code but that won’t change the user experience.
I’ve been wanting to make this change forever. I updated the category listings to now look more like the front page for the site. That is, it uses better styling and image previews. Probably not the final design, but I found few bugs and cleaned a number of things up. I still need to update the tags, but the overall look is much better.