A few thoughts on making this blog a little prettier. I like the general format to begin with, so most of this is just detail:
*Title Font color should match the font color in the banner (the “Mind of Winter” color)
*If its possible to highlight the titles of posts it might break up the post and clearly delineate when a post begins
*The name of the poster looks more naturally to me at the bottom of the post
*I always feel better when the links bar is on the left. Also, it should start below the “Mind of Winter” banner, so that the color goes all the way across the screen.
Something that is unnecessary but would be cool:
*A feature that would be really awesome would be to have a link to one single window (that pops up separately) that contains all the poems we’ve done (instead of making them posts). I’d be glad to compile this file. Anyway, I find that as I’m posting it would be nice to have a small window open somewhere that has the actual poem.
All in all this is a great format. I hope that it is well used…
2 responses to “Some Blog Suggestions”
I’ve changed the style a bit, but I want to reiterate—I’m not a designer, and I know there’s a lot of room for improvement. Any suggestions, direction, criticism, or instruction is certainly welcome. I still don’t really like the color scheme, and I’m not wild about the way I did the post titles, and I really don’t like how the dates appear right now. If you’ve got ideas, post away.
*Title Font color should match the font color in the banner
Done.
*If its possible to highlight the titles of posts it might break up the post and clearly delineate when a post begins
Done.
*The name of the poster looks more naturally to me at the bottom of the post
Done.
*I always feel better when the links bar is on the left. Also, it should start below the “Mind of Winter” banner, so that the color goes all the way across the screen.
Done.
*A feature that would be really awesome would be to have a link to one single window (that pops up separately) that contains all the poems we’ve done (instead of making them posts).
One problem: not posting the poems means that they won’t be available for searches (notice the search field in the menu column). Technical details you can appreciate: the posts are all stored in an SQL relational database back-end, and the search function just queries the post tables for rows WHERE post_content LIKE “search terms”. I’d prefer to keep them as posts so they’re searchable. I think there’s a better solution, though. Each post can be assigned a category, and the category link on the left brings up all posts in the category. I was thinking of categorizing the poems by author, but we could just have a “poem” category if you want all the poems on the same page. Would that work? Alternatively, I could possibly write a separate page that queries the database for particular markup, so as long as we identify poems with appropriate HTML, it would be able to pull all the poems at once, perhaps even ordered by author and title. This would take me some time to develop, though, so it’s a bit farther off.
More to come when I get a chance…I’m thinking of putting in a style switcher so you can choose your own layout, and cleaning up the links, and… and…
*A feature that would be really awesome would be to have a link to one single window (that pops up separately) that contains all the poems we’ve done (instead of making them posts).
Done, sort of. Posted poems will automatically appear on the “posted poems” page (new-window link on left) as long as they include the proper markup. The quick-buttons in the edit/post window should be relatively self-explanatory. Each poem should have a poem title; as long as that’s in there, the poem will show up on the poem page.
I also played around a bit with the calendar. I don’t know how useful the calendar is in general, but it should be easier to see what day today is (Eastern time) and which days had new posts.