Accessibility and Blosxom
Catching up with things today, I read what Mark’s been doing on the accessibility front. A great job it is too. I thought I might contribute a tiny bit of the jigsaw for the Blosxom users, specifically regarding the meaningful page titles and additional navigation aids.
I’ve updated my weblog in these two areas; each specific page - be it a year, or a year/month, or a year/month/day specification, now includes the appropriate date in the page title. I’ve added a <link rel=”home” … > link too, which I’d thought fleetingly about when I was looking at other attributes of the <link/> tag but had forgotten until being reminded by Mark.
To achieve this sort of thing, you can just add the extra bits in the head.html template. I’ve taken Blosxom’s default/builtin head template (which is inside Blosxom itself) and amended it appropriately - you can have see what it looks like here - to use it, just place the file in same directory that you keep your .txt files.
In actual fact, I use Blosxom more of an engine that generates the blog postings for me, which I then include, via SSI, in a template that holds together lots of elements, such as the calendar, and the various lists. So I don’t use the head.html template file. Instead, I wrote a tiny script, blostitle, which outputs the appropriate date string for appending to the title. I include the <link rel=”home” … > link manually in the SSI. Altogether, the <head/> part looks like this:
<head> ... <title> DJ's Weblog - <!--#include virtual="/~dj/cgi-bin/blostitle" --> </title> <!--#include file="style.incl" --> <link rel="home" title="Home" href="/qmacro" /> ... </head>