A clean new website

We're more-or-less done updating and fixing up the M.B. Marsh Design website. The big things are done: We're now running on a modern Drupal 7 core, and we're excited about the new, fully responsive, mobile-friendly HTML5 visual theme. (For those who care, it's based on Pixture Reloaded by Jeff Burnz.)

There may be some lingering glitches, and we have a lot of small, gradual changes to roll out in the coming months. Bug reports are welcome (just leave a comment below).

One big change is to our RSS subscription feeds. The old "everything" feed is being retired; cross-posting everything to the root domain made for wonky search engine optimization and a cluttered feed. Going forward, new articles on completely unrelated topics will be posted to the respective sub-sites. So, if you find any of this stuff worthwhile, please point your news reader of choice at whichever feeds you care about:

http://boating.marsh-design.com/?q=rss.xml for The Marsh Fleet (boating, cruising & watersports)

http://marine.marsh-design.com/?q=rss.xml for M.B. Marsh Marine Design (yacht design & systems engineering)

http://photo.marsh-design.com/?q=rss.xml for M.B. Marsh Photography

http://tech.marsh-design.com/?q=rss.xml for Thoughts On Tech (computer technology, security, Internet issues)

http://sust.marsh-design.com/?q=rss.xml for The Long View (sustainable energy, resource management, construction, development & planning)

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Comments

Feeds

Hi Matt,

Nice new web site.

Is there any way at all we can still have one feed for all your stuff? I like to read everything you write, but adding five feeds to my reader is going to clutter it a bit.

Many sites, one feed

Matthew's picture

Thanks John.
I'll see what I can do to provide a single / combined feed option.
The trouble with the way I've been doing it for the last few months is that it creates navigation problems and bad SEO. I had been compiling the "everything" feed by cross-posting all articles to the root domain, where they automatically became part of its RSS feed. That worked, sort-of, but it meant that anyone clicking or linking to the site from the RSS would end up in the root domain, and not see the surrounding sidebars, article lists, etc. that are specific to each sub-site. It also meant that Googlebot, etc. would have the same problem.
There may be a way to hack something together that'll do what you want, I'll give it a try and let you know.

Combined feed (temp hack but it works)

Matthew's picture

John (and anyone else who wants a single combined RSS feed):
I've hacked together a combined feed with RSSMix that should do what you want. (It's just an aggregation of the individual sub-site feeds.)
http://www.rssmix.com/u/3787396/rss.xml
This isn't a perfect solution- it can't combine cross-posted entries, for example, so the current list includes some duplicates- but it should do the job until I can whip up something proper.

Combined feed is working

Now available at the same address as pre-redesign:
http://www.marsh-design.com/?q=rss.xml
Took a bit of poking away at Drupal 7 Domain Source to get it to reliably set canonical source domains, but items from the RSS feed are showing up at the correct URLs now and so I think I can safely say it's working.

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