figby.com

I’ve been working on a gradual redesign and update of The Quotations Page for a while now. Last month I put the new layout online. It looks almost the same as the old layout, but it’s more flexible and the code is less messy. It still uses tables, but far fewer of them, and it won’t be hard to update to a table-free version in the future. I also made some usability improvements, like displaying 30 quotations on each author’s page instead of 10.

Today I rolled out another new feature: Each quotation has its own permalink page. Now other sites and discussion forums can link to a single quote, and I can add features specific to a quote, like the email-to-a-friend feature I also launched today. We can also add notes and cross-references for specific quotations (example).

Thanks to Apache’s mod_rewrite, PHP, and MySQL, the net result is that the site contains 20,700 new HTML pages of content. I’m eagerly awaiting Google and Yahoo crawling through all of them, and less eagerly awaiting finding out what this does to the server’s performance.

The icons next to each quote are from Dan Cederholm’s Stockholm set, which I highly recommend. They’re positioned using a floated <div> layer, which isn’t perfect but at least displays the same in IE and Mozilla.

It’s a start. My quotations site has many more changes on my to-do list: a new search engine, some personalization features, a new design and color scheme, cleaning up the code, and getting it to validate. I’m hoping to finish all of these in time for the site’s 10-year anniversary in November.