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Busy little House-elfs

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Busy little House-elfs

Hello everyone, you may have noticed some changes around here lately, most of them right here in the What’s New section of the site.

The Lexicon Blog

First of all, the What’s New section has now become The Lexicon Blog.  And it’s more than just a change in title.

While the What’s New section of the blog was managed by a copy of WordPress, it wasn’t presented as a blog.  Instead it was presented as a modified version of what the What’s New page always was, a date based list of updates.

We’ve replaced the old archive pages with a full WordPress theme on the blog itself, including pagination, categories, yearly, monthly, and author archives.  Each post now has it’s own url, with the comments for that post displayed on the same page as the post itself.  This makes it easier to foster discussions on posts.

We’ve merged the Lexicon Podcast (previously in its own copy of WordPress) into the main blog as a category of the blog.  This means that you can subscribe to one feed to know if either the site or the podcast has been updated (of course you can still subscribe to just the podcast if you like).

We’ve manually created entries for everything on the old what’s new pages.  Previously the blog only had posts back to August 11, 2006.  We’ve added in all the entries from the old What’s New pages into the blog so that one set of archives now includes everything ever posted to a what’s new page.

Social Comments!  The Pensieve can now better connect thoughts to people, thanks to the fabulous Disqus commenting system.  You can now log in using your social media profiles.  You can log in with Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or a number of other social media profiles.  It also lets you subscribe to your own comments, so that you’ll get notified if anybody replies to you.

Commentary

The most awesome change to the Lexicon Blog is that it is no longer limited to site updates (not that it ever was, as articles about new canon have popped up in the What’s New section for years), but moving to a Blog allows us to use it for more than just site news.  In the past week Steve has posted 7 great posts on canon topics.  If you haven’t already read them, be sure to check them out.

Style Changes

In order to accommodate the additional navigation of the blog, some stylistic changes had to be made to the site.  You might notice that the left navigation bar is wider throughout the site, and here in the blog you’ll notice additional boxes on the sidebar to help you navigate the Lexicon blog (with Categories and Date based archives)

While I was at making style changes however, I took a little time to do a fix to an issue that had been annoying me about the lexicon for years.  If you had a large or high resolution monitor, the Lexicon’s background image would repeat after 1,448 pixels, causing the tan gradient that is on the left to suddenly reappear on the right.  As a temporary fix, I made the background image no longer repeat on the X-Axis, and set a background color of a shade of gray similar in tone to the dotted background we all know and love.

Much more to come

I know these changes seem minor, we all want content changes, and Steve has done many little updates throughout the site over the last year, but we are working on some big changes that are coming soon.

First and foremost I’m working on some new stylesheets for the site that will convert the existing design to a responsive design.  This will allow most lexicon pages to load in a much more readable format on smartphones and tablets.

The bigger change we’re not quite ready to comment on just yet, but Steve and I are working on a project that will raise the lexicon to a whole new level, and we are barely holding our tongues from spilling the beans on the project.

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