Expanding the Empire

• Field Notes
• Camera Roll
• Keyboard Navigation
• One Way Traffic

I added a couple of things during the recent Perpetual βeta reboot. The “Field Notes” and “Camera Roll” sections are new. I also modified the home page by replacing the Twitter feed with a new “Latest Field Notes” feed.

Field Notes

Field Notes are micro-posts. They’re random thoughts, links to Internet content I found interesting or useful and other smaller items that I’d like to share. I used to do this with a Twitter feed but, because of my usage pattern with Twitter, I found there were items going on to the home page that I really didn’t want there and I wanted more separation. Additionally, Field Notes aren’t subject to the limitations placed on a Twitter feed.

Camera Roll

The Camera Roll is a moderated photo stream. We sort the gallery in descending time-stamp order (most recent images first). The meta data of an image is accessible from the photo-viewer (depending on availability). The Camera Roll probably won’t get updated too frequently as I don’t take photographs as often these days as I once did. But, who knows, maybe that’ll change.

Keyboard Navigation

I have added “previous” and “next” keyboard shortcuts to paginated pages and to the Camera Roll. Pressing the H key is the equivalent of clicking a “previous” (or similar) control. The L key will navigate to the “next” item or page. In case you’re wondering why I chose those keys, let’s just call it nostalgia.

I also addressed one of my pet peeves: you can now escape from the search input field by pressing the esc key. Yay!

One Way Traffic

Now that I have my website under version control and with my new dev-to-live workflow, my content creation is all handled locally, never on the live server. To this end, I have disabled the administration interface to the CMS on the live server. Not only will this prevent me from breaking my process, it also has the added benefit of increasing the security of the website.