Tank

Introducing ‘running commentary’

The development of e-vent (or rather ‘Fighting Talk’ as it’s now aptly called) on the Tank platform allowed us to explore a couple of relevant concepts and push Tank into new directions. Most importantly, it enabled us to jump straight into a community of active participants and test not only our assumptions but the framework itself.

e-vent differs from conventional blogs in that it allows for free-flowing comments that are not tied to a post. We solved this issue by allowing not only for regular post comments (like all other blogs out there) but also allowing for page comments within Tank.

Another variation from convention is that this ‘running commentary’ will eventually disappear from the site, as opposed to ‘standing commentary’ that sticks around forever:

Running comments (comments attached to pages - in this case the Home page) are displayed in reverse-chronological order (latest first) as the conversation here is ongoing: you catch the last bit of the conversation and have your say immediately.

Standing comments (comments attached to posts) are displayed in conventional chronological order (first first) to allow readers to view the entire conversation as it happened and add their 2 cents at the end.

This approach is clearly quite specific; as I mentioned it breaks from the norm and is not applicable to most other sites. Still, the fact that Tank is flexible enough to allow me to indulge a bit I find gratifying.

Share, remix and attribute

The other neat aspect of re-developing e-vent on the Tank platform was the way we went about it. Le Roux has been porting different skins to test the workings of Tank: k2, Hemingway, Cutline, Simpla and Scribbish. I took an initial liking to Scribbish (must’ve been that big fat font), and, in keeping with it’s MIT License remixed it to what you see now. A side-by-side comparison will reveal a certain likeness, certainly from a typography point of view. In fact, the astute amongst you would notice that the Tank blog itself was developed in a similar fashion, but I’ll save that story for another time.

More important aspects happened behind the scenes though:

“(The Scribbish ) layout standardizes on a simple xhtml structure, blog entries are formatted using the hAtom microformat specification, and styles are separated into individual files which are included in the correct order, making it easier to control the cascade and to figure out ‘what-goes-where’.” - Jeffrey Allan Hardy

This, in combination with it’s minimalist style and the fact that it’s very easy to modify, meant I could roll out e-vent quickly, and get to the bit I really enjoy faster: making design tweaks and adjustments once we have live data. Testing in the wild, in other words.

SEO ‘Design’

I’ve been doing a bit of reading about simple, practical SEO lately, in particular on copyblogger and Pearsonified. Both of them emphasize aspects I’ve always overlooked when it comes to webdev: descriptive page titles and well written headlines.

From a development point of view Chris Pearson states that the simplest, most effective SEO move you can make
is to construct “constructing dynamic, descriptive <title> tags for each page of your site”. From a writing point of view Brian Clark summarizes it by advising to start with the headline first.

We’ve been building these insights into the Tank framework, but during the final stages of working on e-vent it all came together. e-vent‘s always been more about the content (the flyers) than anything else. Even it’s own identity is formed around the content it holds. The initial design had the phrase ‘Fighting Talk’ at the top of each permalink, with the subsequent title of the flyer a couple of notches down in a <h2>.

Then it hit me: why not replace the primary ‘Fighting Talk’ <h1> with the title of the flyer on each of the permalinks? The result? Great looking showcases for each and every flyer on the site, which I love as much as Google does. In fact, next on my list to bring that approach over to this blog.