Miscellany


First, I should apologize if anyone has experienced difficulty with the site recently. I had a small communication error with the webhost and some configuration files were deleted. Everything’s been recovered, but there was a day or two of garbage loading… Anyway, in straightening that stuff out, I made a few minor changes to the layout:

  1. Recent comments: I added a list of the most recent comments to the sidebar, so that you can see if there are new comments on older posts. For instance, I can see right now that I have not yet commented on Brian’s brilliant post from a couple weeks back, which I have been meaning to do. If you don’t like where the list is placed, we can move it. If you don’t like it there at all, we can remove it. And we can color it pink if you’d like…
  2. I coded up a font selector to make it easier to play around with the font face. You should see a selection bar in the sidebar just below the list of categories. Of course, if you don’t have the font installed on your computer, it won’t show up. The font will then default to your browser’s default font of the family under which it is listed (for instance, if you selected “Vivaldi Italic” but you don’t have that font, you’ll get your browser’s default “cursive” font. Previously, fonts were selected in the this order: Perpetua, Bodoni MT, Georgia, ‘book antiqua’, ‘goudy old style’, ‘century schoolbook’, ‘Times New Roman’. I just chose a list of fonts that I have on my machine; you may have few or none of them. If you’d like me to add a font to the list, let me know.
  3. Some minor adjustments of margins and things. Nothing major.

I suppose I should also mention that there are a plethora of free layouts available.


3 responses to “Miscellany”

  1. Would it be possible to make the light green text darker? For example, in the sidebar I can clearly read “american verse project”, but have to work a bit for “archive of american verse from before 1920”.

    The recent comments list is a good addition.

  2. Brian said:
    Would it be possible to make the light green text darker?

    Yes, and I have done so, but as I’m sure you can see that introduces a whole new problem: differentiating one link from the next. Should I put some space between them, or make the links stand out even more, or put lines between them, or put them in a bullet list? Hanging indents? I’ve never been terribly happy with how I put this theme together originally, and would love to have some time to really do it right. Maybe in June when I’m unemployed. Until then, if you see other sites where you think they’ve done something particularly well, let me know (there are a number of interesting designs prepackaged). It’s always easier to steal than to do the work myself. [You may have to hold ‘ctrl’ down while reloading the page to see changes to the layout. Browsers cache the layout to save bandwidth, so you might have to tell it to pull everything anew.—Ed.]

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