Many New Features

March 18th, 2011

Three days ago I promised new features. After a gradual and stealthy launch of the last few UI elements, everything is now ready to go, so I'd be happy if those of you who are interested would like to check it out. To that I should add that not all of the features listed below have only been around for the last few days, but they are all showcased here for the first time. Here are the new features in no particular order…

Categories/Keywords

It was planned for a long time, now it's implemented: I can now tag my blog entries and other content with keywords. For example, above this blog entry there is a slightly grayed out “website” (at least if you visit my website and don't read the RSS feed directly). Clicking on it will bring you to a list of all entries that are tagged with the keyword “website.”

Analogous to the blog entries, the keywords also refer to lectures and other content deposited on this website. On the orange entry pages, however, they are not placed above the entry, but between the description and the comment section.

A click on the headline in one of these keyword fields leads you to my “tag cloud,” which shows all assigned keywords at once, where the relative size results in a highly mathematical way from the number of existing entries for the keyword, offset by their respective age. The cloud is available on the start page in a minified version.

By the way, each keyword has its own RSS feed, which can be found on the keyword page under the last entry or where your browser shows you RSS feeds for the current page.

Translations of Blog Posts

This website was designed from the beginning to support multilingualism, at least German and English should be possible. My initial vision was that I would write every entry in both languages. For all non-blog entries I still do that, but for blog entries I only do the work if they seem very important or are very short.

For all other cases I now offer automatic translations. The idea behind this is that (although the translations are sometimes far from perfect) an English-speaking reader still has a better chance to understand it than if the text is only available in German. The translations can currently be admired on the English overview page of my blog, where they have their own link below the posts I have written only in German. Behind that you can find the translation along with a warning regarding the quality.

Normally I read them only once to make sure that there are no gross falsifications of meaning. But I do not make any guarantees.

Language and License Info

I can now add additional information to the links below the entries about lectures, articles or other media. As a visitor you will notice that there is now a small icon if a PDF file, a video etc. is available under a free license (and if so, under which one), and that another one is displayed if a file or video is in a different language than the one you are reading the website in. Since my stuff is pretty much all in German at the moment, the latter only affects English-speaking visitors so far.

Print Stylesheet

My CSS can now handle it much better if you want to print something from my website. There will be serif fonts, no background colors, no navigation stuff and other such customizations. Feel free to try it out if you like.

Miscellaneous

Otherwise, there have been the usual small improvements under the hood, which I've largely forgotten again already. Among other things, I made sure that everything here validates as XHTML 1.1. I hope I didn't miss anything.

As always: If you have any questions, wishes, or discovered bugs, feel free to contact me.