There's been a ton of updates to the template designs in the last 48 hours, as you can probably tell - over 30 individual changes altogether, which I know because I had to write them all down, because the list of stuff to do was just getting too big to keep straight in my head anymore. Here is a list of them all, for any fellow design or programming geeks who are interested.

RSS version: Okay, I lied the other day when I said this was frozen. The problem specifically is with my supplemental feed, which is supposed to deliver the full 2,000-word entries for people who wish to read my journal that way - namely, it's not inserting blank lines between paragraphs in the feed itself, meaning that subscribers are getting all 2,000 words delivered as one unending paragraph. I know that there's a way to get these blank lines to appear, because I subscribe to all kinds of feeds that do so - but now that I think about it, I'm not sure if they're RSS feeds coming in that display paragraphs correctly, or Atom feeds. Anyway, if someone with a little expert knowledge can help me out, just let me know. As soon as this one glitch is fixed, the feeds will be perfect and won't have to be screwed with again.

Print version: Okay, I lied the other day again when I said this one was finished too. Specifically, the other day I hunted down this attribute in CSS that I vaguely remembered existing, that tells your browser to actually display the URL that a hyperlink points to, right in the text itself; that way, people reading a paper version of your blog will see not only that you had a hyperlink at a certain point, but will also see the URL that hyperlink pointed to in the interactive screen version. Anyway, that's the only change - the template is back to being frozen again. Here's the attribute, by the way, if you want to use it in your own print template:

The " [" marks are in there to set the URL off a little when it's displayed; otherwise it just butts right up against your link with no extra space. The "href" in that attribute can be replaced with "title" to display the title of that link, by the way, or "alt" to display the alternative text of that link as well.

Email/SMS version: No changes since the last update; the pages for subscribing and unsubscribing to the list now exist, and all I need to do is get into my configuration file on the server and do a little customizing. I'm anticipating having this entire version finished and ready to go within the next week.

The Jason Pettus Instant Locator™: One slight change since the last update - the JPIL is now displaying the title field of entries as well, just to give people one more tiny bit of information. Other than that it's finished, and I've already been successfully using it for several days now. In the next week or two I'll be posting a tutorial here on the subject as well, for fellow MovableType owners who wish to set up their own Instant Locator - all it takes is one more blog at your account, one plug-in, and a couple of hours' worth of setup. Could the IL be the future of social networking? I think there's a case for arguing such a thing; unlike the companies that currently exist (Dodgeball, MySpace, Yahoo 360, etc), the people who want to track your IL don't have to join the same proprietary service you do, but instead merely own an RSS reader (or even more simple, an email account or a cellphone). That way anyone who wanted to could be broadcasting an IL signal from their own personal blog, and their particular personal friends could subscribe to it and get the latest delivered in real time - much like the way you can currently sign up for a feed of your friend's Flickr account, for example, and get all their newest photos delivered to you the moment they upload them. Except in the case of Instant Locators, you can also designate that the short text updates be sent straight to your cellphone in real time via SMS. Anyway, more details next week.

Desktop version: Lots of changes. In the "email this entry" box, changed the description of the "from" field from "From" to "Your email address," to reflect the fact that the service won't work unless you type one in. Added the day to the datestamp at the top of the page, in a different color and positioned slightly differently than the rest of the stamp, to make it look cool. Categories now being displayed with simple paragraph markers and hand-defined indents; I never could get the list function in HTML to display precisely the way I wanted it to. White space added to the side of all menu images found on this page (the handwritten headlines), so that they'll display better when viewed in mobile devices. I also made a few cosmetic changes to the trackback box - the ping link is now bold-faced, and trackbacks are separated by a 75-percent-wide horizontal rule.

By the way, I confirmed yesterday that that runaround I mentioned concerning an entry's body text works, as far as getting your desktop template to load elegantly in mobile devices; if you use "padding" to define your left and right edges instead of "margin," and include this definition in the layout portion of your CSS classification (typically your ID definitions) instead of in the content portion (typically your CLASS definitions), then mobile devices will simply ignore the settings and display the text from the extreme left-hand edge of a phone's screen to the extreme right-hand edge. Thank God - given that mobile readers will be shuttled off to the desktop template every time they call up an old entry, the template's looking a lot better these days when it comes to such tiny little screens. (By the way, I counted the page views that I was talking about the other day [tested on a palmOne Treo 600, running Blazer] - before the optimizations, mobile readers had to click their "scroll" button 216 times to read the entire page from top to bottom, and now they only have to scroll 103 times, so you can see what a difference such little changes can make. By the way part 2, mobile readers only have to scroll 64 times when viewing the special mobile version, so you can see why it makes sense to develop a special template like I did as an alternative to your main front page - which, let's face it, is the page that gets viewed more times than any other single element at your website.)

Mobile version: A number of changes here too. Same fix to the "email this entry" box as the desktop version, to reflect the fact that you're required to type in a "from" email address to get it to work. (I'm not collecting that information, by the way - it's just the default setting on the automated service.) Shrank the text size of the main menu, just because it didn't need to be as big as it was. Added the special CSS classification that's also found in the desktop version, for displaying computer code in a special little off-color box within the body entries; hopefully that will make my code quotes here make a little more visual sense. And finally, I made a few cosmetic changes there as well; the sidebar now more closely resembles the content of the desktop version, information is now ordered a little more logically, and I've fixed some of the titles to now display exactly as correctly as they're supposed to. And finally, finally I have my access keys now defined in a way that works on every device I'm using to test this new site. What I wrote in the last update is still all true - to assign an access key to a hyperlink, simply type:

That way someone a mobile device or cellphone can simply press the "1" button on their keypad to go automatically to this new page. (Windows users can press "Alt-1" to access this shortcut as well; Mac users can press "Cmd-1.") And if you want an access key to simply skip to a different area of the same page (a quite important function in mobile versions, because they're so damn long when displayed on those tiny little screens), you simply add a blank anchor to wherever on the page you want that access key to take them:

Where I got it wrong the other day, though, is that you still need to include a hyperlink somewhere on the page as well, to get the access key to work:

It turns out, in fact, that access keys can only work on "actionable" items - tags in HTML that specifically call for an action to take place, like the <a href> tag or certain tags in a form. So, you can still have places on a single page that mobile readers can jump to with keypad shortcuts, and you still define those places with the empty anchor ("a") tag; you simply need to include the actionable link reference somewhere on the page as well. Whew!

And is that all to report today? Yeah, I think it is! In general I can report that the development process is going much more quickly than I was expecting it to, and that there's actually a chance of the entire thing being finished and "official" by the end of July, a full month earlier than I was anticipating. Well, hooray for me, I guess; it means I can get back to my my latest travel book that much more quickly, and hopefully have that finished and out to everyone who pre-purchased a copy by this August. Wow, and just in time to start fundraising for the South Africa tour taking place this October! That's yet another cool thing about this new category system I have at my disposal here at MT - I'll be able to set up a "Travel | South Africa" category just to track all the entries I write this summer and fall about the trip, South African history, online resources, etc. And then anytime from now until the trip that someone new hears about the tour for the first time, they'll be able to simply click on that link and read up on everything I've so far written on the subject. Plus I can assign an RSS feed just to that category, like I've previously mentioned, so anyone who wants will be able to subscribe just to it and get updated only when I post new entries concerning South Africa. So cool! Now if it'll only help generate more pre-tour donations...