Submissions and visits

A big thank you to dizzy and Edd Dawson for being the first two to get stuck in. dizzy submitted the first recipe (I don't count), but Edd beat him in being the first to get involved. I'm hoping that more of you will find some time and find a recipe to submit over the weekend.

More than 1,000 people have seen the site now and a couple of hundred of them have been here more than once — this is between Monday and Wednesday as I get the stats from Google Analytics a day late. This is pretty encouraging and I hope a good indicator that people will find the site useful and maybe even get involved.

I've re-arranged the content on the front page a little and will remove the libraries from the site map page (they're just clutter there). I hope it's better. I also ought to do something to clarify the navigation panel on the left.

I've been a bad boy and used a table for layout on the front page, but I don't really want to be fighting CSS and divs for hours when I could be doing something more productive. If somebody knows a good way of doing it please leave a note.

It isn't absolutely clear, at least to me, what ought to go on the front page, so if you have suggestions just post a comment on this post. Is what is there fine, should some things have more prominence or less prominence?

dizzy also suggested something I'd been wondering about but couldn't make my mind up about until we discussed it. You might notice that the format of the URLs for the recipes has changed. Recipes still need unique names, but the shorter URLs will be easier to copy and paste, although of course they're also less descriptive.

I'm going to leave the libraries ones unchanged so that they will be easier to remember. There's less of them and I think it's more likely that people will want to be able to enter them from memory. Again, if you have any feelings about this one way or another then let me know.

And finally, I've talked to a designer about getting the site looking a bit nicer. I want to do it without making the site so graphically heavy it becomes slow though. Dave Abrahams has given his blessing to use something more in keeping with the other Boost documentation which I think gives us a good starting point, although I'm not sure we want to make it look exactly the same (especially as the site is unofficial).

It'll be some weeks before we're ready with it (especially as I'm sneaking off diving for a week next week — but I'll be checking in here at least daily), so do make suggestions!