Glass House – blog fiction

  • I finally got this looking close to decent, so I may as well start promoting it:
    https://www.invisiblejames.com

    Content:It’s blogfic with a speculative air to it. I shan’t explain deeper than that.

    Technical: Because the site’s so text-heavy, I went for a modified Toni style, as I considered it clean and readable for long entries. Since this is essentially a serial story, my theory was that a fair number of people would be reading the archives, so I wanted to make it easy for them to read forward. The only vaguely annoying part was making the archives list in ascending order on the sidebar. I had to hack the get_archives function for that.

    So check it out, if you like, and let me know what you think. Any suggestions gratefully accepted, particularly those that can help me make the site as easy-to-navigate and “sticky” as possible. Thanks, and Have Fun.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Looks good! My only suggestion would be to use a brighter/lighter blue in the sidebar to give the b/g a bit more contrast to the sidebar text. This will make it a bit easier to read.

    I’m having fun! Good to see you are too!

    yeah, I like it – a good read.
    cheers

    Thread Starter ijames

    (@ijames)

    Thanks, folks. I’ll play a bit more with the colors; that particular blue is just about the only thing left untouched from the Toni style. >8-> I now have four whole hours of experience with CSS, so I suppose screwing around with RGB color values is the natural next step.

    Any opinions about the font? Is it too small? Sans serif too hard to read? I tried playing a bit with Times for the main content, but I’m not sure I like it. Makes it look too much like a school term paper. I know almost as little about typography as I do about site design, so if anyone has any good ideas, I’m all ears.

    the font is fine – I’m using IE at 800×600 – I prefer sans serif for reading off a screen.
    I’d really like to know how you got the archives to run in ascending order.
    Actually, what I’d really like to know is if it is possible to have just one category running in ascending order, with others descending.

    Thread Starter ijames

    (@ijames)

    Marko: (Polo?)
    I’d really like to know how you got the archives to run in ascending order.

    That was actually two separate problems. Making the archives themselves run in order was pretty easy — I set up my permalinks in the options, added the proper rules to .htaccess, then edited .htaccess again and added “&order=ASC” to the calls on index.php.

    Making the months listing in the sidebar run forward was actually harder. There’s no order parameter to the get_archives function, so I had to find the function code in wp-include and alter the ORDER BY clause in the SQL statement itself. That was annoying. Perhaps I’ll add the parameter myself and submit it to WP as a patch. I haven’t contributed to a lot of open source software before, so we’ll see how hard that process is.

    Actually, what I’d really like to know is if it is possible to have just one category running in ascending order, with others descending.

    I’m sure you can. The easiest way I can think of is to add a RewriteRule to .htaccess that includes the category name in its pattern, and add the &order=ASC only to that rule. It’s kind of a kludge, but you wouldn’t have to mess around in any WordPress code.

    I really don’t understand – sorry – newbie to this stuff – in particular- php and what ever .htaccess is – could you explain more simply, please?
    cheers,
    marko (not polo – actually, my name is kier, my dog’s name is marko – named after a friend of mine – Mark).

    Thread Starter ijames

    (@ijames)

    Yeah, I didn’t think your name was Polo, that was a joke.

    The .htaccess file sits in your blog directory and tells the Web server how to handle requests. You can Google to find out more about it. If you’ve set up permalinks on your blog (under “Options”) it’ll tell you what to put in that file. What I’m saying is, paste in exactly what the permalinks screen tells you to paste in, but also add <b>&order=ASC</b> to the end of each line that references <b>index.php</b>.

    Does that make sense? If you aren’t familiar with PHP, then fixing the dates in the sidebar listing may be a bit advanced. I’d advise it’s probably not something to worry about until and unless WordPress supports an order parameter on that function.

    Good luck!

    – iJames
    https://www.invisiblejames.com

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • The topic ‘Glass House – blog fiction’ is closed to new replies.