February 14, 2007
Happy Valentine’s Day! And layout stuff…

Happy Valentine’s Day, minna-san! Alas, I don’t have a new article or anything for you today, but I did want to let you know that I have been fooling around with the site a whole bunch today, even if my work ultimately comes to naught. See, for ages (ages!) I’ve been doing the content pages manually, which is to say that I wrote the blurbs, pasted them onto the content pages in the appropriate spaces, and trimmed the remaining post in order to maintain a set number of article links on the main page — or not, in the case of the category pages. While I do like this because it lets me browse the site in full on my hard drive and isn’t dependent upon a database or other program outside of Notepad (++), it does prevent me from easily limiting the number of article links to a page. For instance, the Dusty Plastic HELL page is reaaaally long now — and while I could chop it up into a few pages, maintaining a set post limit on each page would basically require me to shift entries on each page each update (as opposed to just removing them). So I’m thinking that I’m going to start using the WordPress blog to handle all of this as well.

Of course, none of this will be happening in the immediate future, as it’ll take me quite a while to manually add every single article blurb I’ve ever written to the database, but if you notice anything wonky about the blog in the meantime it likely has something to do with that. (Still, please let me know if you find anything wonky! I need to know about ’em so I can try to fix ’em. :)) Frex, when adding some older articles to the WP database here, I noted that the monthly archives list to the right was including the months that I posted those articles in the list, even though I’ve got it set up so these posts will not display on any of the blog’s pages. As a result, there were several empty months in the list, as quite a few of the features and articles that I’ve written predate the creation of the SC blog and even the Side Talk block that the older layouts featured. To fix that, I’ve restricted the list to showing only the past 18 months, but that prevents you from easily selecting a month before that period and reading the posts there. However, if there’s a particular older post that you kinda think you remember, you should be able to access it via the search bar, although it’ll be way, way back at the end. I know, you’re probably not all that miffed — I don’t imagine many people would be interested in reading the Side Talk blurbs from 2004 and early 2005 anyway! — but it bears mentioning, I guess.

Anyway, here are previews of how the Main and Print Reviews pages are more/less going to look. Natch, there are very few aesthetic differences between them and the current pages, as I’m not really changing the layout so much as trying to replicate it using WordPress. Each of the individual blurbs was entered as a post, much like the one that you are reading right now, albeit much shorter and posted to a different category that is ruled by a modified template. So far, so good, yes? I’ve only added the Print Reviews articles and several more recent pieces from other categories for test purposes, but eventually it should all be set up so that the page looks… well, exactly the same, except with a limit of 25 or 36 or however many feature blurbs I decide should appear on the category pages. Then there will be a link to the next page or something somewhere. I’m not sure how it’ll work out — or if it’ll work out, but fingers crossed. 🙂

And hang in there — I’ll have new content ready for you soon enough! It’s been too long since we’ve seen Kain and Wild Boar Alien, yes? 😉

-posted by Wes | 5:23 pm | Comments (0)
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