artific.com v4

Overnight the 21st March I rolled out a new design for the site, trying to be a bit simpler and cleaner than previous designs. One element of interest to me will be how the larger Google AdSense ad unit will work on the site. I do not get that much revenue from AdSense here but do consult and advise organizations on how to implement AdSense and other ads on their sites.

Another change is that I ceased trying to provide the site in both HTML and XHTML formats. I found it was more often than not a complete pain in the ass to provide XHTML and saw no upside to doing so, so the site is mostly HTML now.

I also removed the content-encoding negotiation I was doing for some of the larger files or frequently requested files like the feed to the site. The various feeds are now provided through Feedburner, the older URLs all redirect to the appropriate Feedburner URL. Other files I had been compressing are instead served through the Panther Express CDN. Panther is based here in New York City and was founded by Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan from DoubleClick.

With this redesign (which has been hanging over my head for months and annoying me) I hope to return to writing more regularly (I'd cut down posting since I hated the previous design and didn't want to call attention to it).

This weekend I will be in Las Vegas, ostensibly for the IA Summit (though I'm not an I/A, my wife is and ex-ibm.com colleague Alex Wright will be speaking. From Vegas I head to San Diego for the 2007 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I had pretty much sworn off returning last year, but had second thoughts about it and decided to come if only to force myself to network a bit, or get out of NYC's mercurial weather for a few days.

Posted in Metadiscourse