Tediously meta: website tweaks
As a run-up to a responsification of my site (which is about bloody time but I fear may turn into a bit of a redesign, hence putting it off for ages) I made some small tweaks to the site:
- I added a max-width:800px to the main content div, after a reader with a widescreen monitor complained (there was previously no maximum). This is temporary while I research a better, more readable line length (current consensus seems to be about 66 characters/ 33 ems which seems absurdly short).
- I removed the now-departed
pubdateattribute of thetimeelement in each article’s header, and replaced it with a microdata attribute. Eacharticleis now associated with schema.org’s Blogposting type and the publication date marked up<time itemprop="dateCreated" datetime="2012-12-18">Tuesday 18 December 2012</time>. - I modified the WordPress behaviour of making the main heading on individual post pages a link to the same page, because (a) it’s daft and (b) a reader complained that (s)he couldn’t copy the title into the clipboard on a phone, because it always activated the link.
- A screenreader user asked me to add an ARIA live region to the comment preview. I dug around the code for the Live Comment Preview plugin and added it on GitHub (kudos to the author Brad Touesnard who accepted my pull request the same day).
Next steps are to rationalise all the links in the sidebar – who really browses blogs by month? – and make it responsive.
3 Responses to “ Tediously meta: website tweaks ”
Just because you mention time – what’s the status on browser’s actually doing something useful with it like localising or formatting (ISO, long, short, etc.)? I think the pubDate discussion was such a sideshow.
Measure’s pretty flexible, I think, both in terms of how it relates to the size of the font you’re using and how comfortable readers are with longer lines (see http://blog.fawny.org/2005/09/21/measures/ – old but useful).
You’re lucky to get such useful accessibility feedback.