iamspaghettihead.com

new features on iamspaghettihead.com

As well as continuously creating and collating content to post on iamspaghettihead.com, I'm also spending time thinking of ways I can improve the site.

I've now completed the first major enhancement project, which encompasses a few small features that I hope will increase accessibility and boost the experience of any visitor who stumbles upon these pages.

These features can be broken down into three main areas:

• • navigation
• • rss subscription
• • BBC world news feed

The first of these is a pretty simple feature, which I think adds a great deal to the browsing experience. I have built in a mechanism so that when the mouse hovers over one of the page titles in the main navigation menu, the text changes colour; essentially becoming a highlighted button.

The second feature, the rss subscription, took a fair amount of research and work to get right. It involves XML rather than HTML and required a lot of trial and error. But, I got there in the end, and you can now subscribe to alerts of the latest updates that appear on the home page whenever any new material posted. To subscribe, click on the little orange icon on the home page. Firefox has its own rss reader built in, so if you use that browser, a box may appear prompting you to subscribe automatically. If you are using another browser, Internet Explorer for example, then you will be taken to another page where you can subscribe using any reader and learn more about feeds.

The final feature that I have added to the home page, is a feed containing headlines from around the world supplied by BBC World News. The software by Jawfish updates the data regularly as news breaks, and I hope this, and the other improvements released on this update, will be useful additions to the site.

I'd welcome feedback so please tweet @Spaghetti_H or e-mail contact@iamspaghettihead.com.

Thanks for visiting and I really hope you enjoy the offerings.

Spaghetti_H

_{posted 23/11/11}