I made another major change in the site today — it has to do with overall look (and some performance).
One thing that I like a lot about TWiki in general is the header/footer information. Simultaneously, it’s also sometimes what I dislike a lot about TWiki. What I like about it is the convenience. The links in the ‘stock’ TWiki header/footer are really convenient, mostly for navigation. There are a few pages I reference (for statistics, diffs, and preferences) which aren’t linked in any other way throughout the website (for a reason). Most people don’t need to see that information (nor really care). You can still find it if you want…and if that’s what you want to see, go for it. I’ve still got this web write-protected for the general public, and even without…the RCS system will easily allow me to view any (unauthorized) changes. Anyway, that’s not what this is about.
But, the main disadvantage of the stock TWiki look is the intimidation/confusion factor. There’s a lot of random information, and some of it’s not very helpful…especially for average Joe Web Browser. What does MZ Online TWiki . Zaskem . WebHome really mean, anyway? 
After doing some brief research on the subject, I decided it appropriate to create my own ‘Matt’s Home on the Web TWiki Skin’ — customized to include the best of both worlds as noted above. It’s just essentially a series of templates that I’ve customized to provide a good feel around here. Things still have the generic TWiki feel and MHotW feel, but in a less-intimidating and more informative way.
Major adjustments to the stock TWiki look:
- More informative (navigationally) page titles:
Matt's Home on the Web - TOPIC NAME - Removal of
MZ Online TWiki > Zaskem > TOPIC NAMEat page top, replaced with friendlierMatt's Home on the Web > TOPIC NAME - Customization of upper right-hand corner text (“Matt’s Other Webs”)
- Automatic inclusion of sidebar and footer pages (this was originally an include I had to manually enter on each page, twice).
- Removal of extra features links average users don’t need to use (e.g. Diffs, Revision Info, Attach Link, Ref-by link, etc.). For pages where it’s nice to have the diffs feature (e.g. Picture Pages), I will provide manual links to that info.
- The main reason for removing the Diffs link at the bottom of each page is pretty simple. mzonline.com gets hit by several crawlers every month. While I’ve got the robots.txt file set up no not allow use of the /rdiff directory under /twiki/bin (as it’s really server-side intense as it compares all past revisions of a given topic before serving the page and honestly isn’t something necessary (in my opinion) for a crawler to index), some requests get pushed through because some crawlers ignore that file and go with whatever they find.
- Change of where footer text is included (and size of footer text).
God bless the TWiki. This should be the last major change in appearance until my next major overhaul…which hopefully won’t be for a year or better.
This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07