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 thetag 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:

 ...
<title> DJ's Weblog - <!--#include virtual="/~dj/cgi-bin/blostitle" --> </title>
<!--#include file="style.incl" -->
<link rel="home" title="Home" href="/qmacro" />
...