Site enhancements

I've just deployed a new version of the site backend, so as always, please let me know (either by ticket or email{.mailto}) if you spot any problems.

The tastiest bit of new functionality in this round of updates is the ability to accept comments on blog posts. It's actually something that has been implemented ever since day one (about a year ago now), but I never turned it on because there were some minor issues that I wanted to address first (described in ticket #1261); things like some ugly CSS on the comments listing and some inefficient queries.

This is quite a change. I don't think I've accepted blog comments on this site since way back in 2000 or 2001. Perhaps in another moment I'll explain my change of heart.

For the time being, however, I'm not going to start using the functionality immediately even though it has been rolled out. I'm going away this weekend and I don't want to post an article which accepts comments until I get back, so I can "baby-sit" it and make sure that everything really is working exactly as expected.

Among other user-visible enhancements and fixes in this deployment include:

• some tweaks to the CSS (nicer-looking buttons and links, for example)
• prettier icons in many places (for things like pagination, external links and email addresses)
• more obvious Atom feed links (via icons)
• removal of some stray divs on static HTML pages
• XHTML validation fix-ups