As part of an ongoing effort to improve Off on a Tangent, I’ve been making a lot of seemingly-small changes to the site over the past couple of weeks. This comes as I continue to hone what I want the site to be and how I want it to be presented to the world, and—meanwhile—begin technical preparations for a major CMS upgrade tentatively scheduled later this year.
These are the main changes I’ve made so far:
- Organization Simplification: There were several categories that were duplicative or overlapping, so I’ve simplified and tweaked them as-appropriate. The biggest example is the new Briefly category, which incorporates the old Rants, News, and Articles categories.
- Winnowing Content: I have been removing content—particularly older content—which isn’t worth reading anymore. This primarily consists of old blog entries, but I’ve also removed some useless content from other sections.
- Consistency Improvements: I have put a lot of effort into improving site-wide consistency. This involves organizational improvements (i.e., making sure content items are in the right categories) and stylistic improvements (i.e., standardizing use of punctuation and content layout). These are still in-progress, but you should notice improvements right away on most content.
- Technological Changes: I have made a number of changes to how content is posted and processed on the back-end. These changes shouldn’t be visible to the readers, but goes a long way toward preparing this site for future upgrades. Also, there’s a good chance that the changes will improve the average page-load time.