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.
Users won’t notice this change directly, but I added some filters to my program administration page. I wanted an easier way to search and find programs missing elements (think images, articles, etc.). To my surprise, I found a couple ZX81 programs missing their respective articles. I call that success.