Tag: Blog Navigation

One of the things I’m striving to achieve within this blog is ease of access to information, be it through the way I use categories and tags for posts or through the use of the available menu options within the blog’s theme.

From time-to-time this inevitably means I tend to reshuffle and refine things in order to  – hopefully – make finding items easier. Those who regularly visit the blog may have noticed already that I’ve done so again, with a further re-vamp of the top menu.

To help you get used to the update menus, here’s quick run-down of what’s changed.

News and Opinion: this menu still provides access to all my “news” and “opinion” articles, all still with their own sub-menus. However, the “SL Project Updates” item has now been re-located to the new SL Tech menu – see below.

SL Tech: this is a new menu heading, and brings together:

• My weekly SL project updates, which look at on-going server-side and viewer work
• My on-going coverage of viewers (official and TPV) – news, reviews, etc.
• Articles on those significant issues that have been covered in these pages
• The various SL tutorials I’ve written, or have pulled into this blog (with the original authors’ permissions) from other sources.

Events-Reviews-Travels: This option still provides access to all my SL event previews and reviews (RFL of SL, Fantasy Faire, SLB, BURN2, etc.), and my reviews of art installations, SL products, the Drax Files, my annual reviews, etc. However, all of my travelogue features and articles on those other virtual worlds and environments can now also be found here.

General: This option now provides access to information on me, my SL interests, this blog, etc., as well as covering those things not intrinsically SL or virtual world focused: spaceflight and astronomy, VR and AR, etc.

As with previous versions of the menu system, clicking on a “main” menu topic will display the entries for all of the sub-menus listed under it (if it has a sub-menu). So, for example, if you click on SL Tech > SL Project Updates all of the project updates I’ve written will be listed chronologically (or you can use the sub-menu to display the updates written in a specific year).

Hopefully, these changes won’t confuse those who have made use of the menus, and will further assist people in finding information in these pages.

As regular readers may have noticed, I’ve produced a number of transcripts for meetings related to LL and which involve the Lab’s CEO or staff.

To make finding these transcripts easier, I’ve added a new tag to the blog, which will appear appended to the end of such posts. Clicking it should list all available transcripts so tagged.

More particularly, I’ve added a new menu category which should make finding them even easier. It’s called Meeting Transcripts, and can be found under News-Updates-Opinion > Linden Lab, thus:

Note the transcripts related to things like specific viewer meetings – such as Firestorm meetings – will remain under the relevant section of the Viewers menu (so Viewers > V3 Style > Firestorm > Firestorm Meetings for … well, Firestorm meetings!).

Hope this makes finding information in the blog a little easier.

Just a quick note to say that I’m doing a little more tweaking to the menus at the top of this blog, and likely will be on-and-off for a bit as I try to make navigation and finding topic categories and groups a little easier within the limitations of WordPress (and without ending-up with a gazillion tags…).

The main tweak for the moment is to the Pey’s Travelogues menu, where I’ve now sub-divided my SL Explorations menu item by year as a sub-menu. While this doesn’t make finding an individual destination review that much easier, it at least breaks down the number of reviews returned compared to clicking on the main link!

Hopefully this will prove to be of some help to people browsing through the places I’ve visited 🙂 .

Back in August 2013 I finally finished-up a complete run-through and rationalisation of the categories, tag, etc., used in this blog to try to ease the process of finding information. At the same time, I also implemented a new top menu structure to further help people find information on a specific topic category.

While I was reasonably happy with the menu system as far as it went, I was still left feeling it might be in need of tweaking.

Today, I’ve managed to put some effort into a little of that tweaking, which will hopefully again ease the process of finding stuff. In particular, regulars my notice that the Other Worlds menu heading has gone, and there is a new heading of Pey’s Travelogues in its place.

This new menu now presents all of my SL destination reviews (re-tagged “Exploring Second Life”), and my news and reviews on other virtual worlds into one menu.

Hopefully this will make finding my SL destination reviews a little easier than hunting down the Events & Reviews menu, although I confess, I’d actually like to make the Exploring Second Life topic a little more granular in nature to ease finding a specific group of destinations – but precisely how to further sort and tag them is a bit of a head-scratcher at the moment.

In the meantime, do take a peek at the new menu option, and don’t forget the other menu items should help in finding stuff, and remember that where an option has a sub-menu, you can either select a topic from the sub-menu or click the parent menu item and get everything listed under it.

Well, it took longer to finish-off than I’d hoped, so apologies to anyone who may have noticed things chopping and changing over the last few days with menu items and sidebar widgets appearing and vanishing. Things should be more-or-less done now.

So what’s happened?

In short, the sidebar on the right of my blog pages has been cleaned-up, with the link lists far more organised than before. The search options have been rationalised, with revised categories and tags which should make it a lot easier to find info, both via the sidebar and through the links at the foot of each post. I’ve kept the tag cloud towards the bottom of the sidebar rather than up with the rest of the search options, as I think it can be a bit of an eyeful, as useful as it might be for finding articles.

Up at the top of each page is a hugely updated menu system. With nigh-on 2,000 articles in this blog, I hope this will make it easier to access information quickly, and when used with article tags allow you to drill down to specific items more easily.

Hopefully the headings are straightforward enough, and I’ve tried to organise things as reasonably / logically as possible through the use of sub-menus. Where these occur, note that clicking on their “parent” item will display all the topics for all of the sub-menu items (so if you click on SL Viewer in the Viewers menu, you’ll get all the articles SL Viewer Updates and SL Viewer Reviews combined).

Anyway, have a play and see what you think. Hopefully I’ve captured everything, but do be aware there still might be the odd tweak here and there over the next few days.