The very nature of blogs – especially those that are topic specific – necessitates archives. Most blogs have archives by date, category and tag. Recently, I took a different approach.

Why bother with slicing and dicing data in different ways, when you can have a single list that facilitates dynamic searching and ordering … all on the client side with a lightweight library?

Given that most blogs don’t have thousands of posts, client side searching of the entire blog metadata (i.e. title, date, category and tags) is feasible on modern mobile devices.

On this site, I’ve used list.js, a library that supports filtering and ordering on lists and tables (based on arbitrary html classes). And pagination support is available (through an extension). Using it is simple, and the list.js documentation and samples are good. I’m surprised that more blogs don’t take a similar approach.

There are a number of older yahoo groups with useful mails. Unfortunately, the current interface makes it very difficult to search. This post describes how to download the mails into a standard mbox.

Sometimes, you’ll find the need to test the jekyll output in multiple environments. Recently, I encountered strange layout behaviours which reproduced only in chrome on windows (and not in chrome on mac osx).

When developing your jekyll site content, you will want to repeatedly run jekyll to ensure that the conversion to static html files works “correctly”. (i.e. you haven’t made any mistakes :-))

One of the “annoying” things about a mac is the fixed menubar that adorns the top of the screen. Yes, you can auto-hide it … but when you need it, it’s not attached to the active window, but to the top of screen.

An advantage of this are the small “apps” that run in the menubar.