Ephems has a facelift

Thanks to my trusty filial Webmeister-in-Chief, Website and Blog Manager, Ephems has had another major makeover. It’s now even more closely integrated with its parent website and the very useful ‘Search’ facility at the top of each page has been restored to health, now for the first time searching the whole of the website and not just the blog. It’s now possible, also for the first time, to append comments to most web pages as well as all blog posts.

The categories in the bar along the top — “Politics”, “Family”, etc. — take you to a list of relevant website pages, but not Ephems blog posts. In contrast, those in the panel down the right-hand side take you to lists of relevant Ephems blog posts (but not to non-blog pages). Many of the non-blog pages are cross-referenced with hyperlinks in blog posts, so it’s generally easy to hop from one to the other.

There are other changes, too, but most won’t affect — or be noticed by — visitors and contributors to the blog and website.

If Manners Makyth Man, vigorous comment makyth a blog. So please keep those comments coming in, whether dissenting or supportive, earnest or witty. Personal abuse and foul language are easily and swiftly deleted, but apart from them (almost) anything goes. Please, though, resist the temptation to write your comment in Word, and then copy-and-paste it into the blog Comment box at the foot of the relevant post. I try to remove all the Word formatting imported with a comment. I do this partly to preserve a reasonable uniformity of style in the blog and to reduce the formatting clutter that documents written in Word generally carry with them, but also because occasionally a comment with Word formatting contaminates subsequent comments with changes of font size and style that are then surprisingly difficult to track down and eliminate. My website guru is working on a gadget that might automatically clean out Word formatting tags and clutter from comments as they are uploaded, but that great work is not yet completed. So I’ll appreciate it if you will write your comment directly into the box provided in Ephems, or as a last resort write it in Notepad (although this has fewer formatting options than the Comment box) and copy-and-paste it from there.

Brian