I've finished up the rest of the content pieces, now its just time to tidy up.
For the sake of getting this redesign live, I've opted to include my portfolio information at a later time.
If everything goes according to plan, the site should be live by this weekend!
I've got the Recommended section up and running on the test server.
Development is slow going the past week (as is my blog writing!) but I did get the Recommended section ready. I'm hoping to get some fedback at the meetup tonight and probably some questions as to why I'm not using WordPress because Alex King is supposed to show up!
Anyway, the Recommended section breaks down exactly as I thought it would, with my only addition being "Recently Added" to the recommended page. Other than that, everything looks pretty good (other than the design of the "Latest" part that I'm going to continue working on) and I'm ready to try and finish up this dam thing!
About, Portfolio and Contact is all that's left.
I've spent the past few days adapting my new style to a test site on my server.
What a ride. I can safely say that I have never worked this much in MovableType, and I'm not even done yet. Here's the blow-by-blow:
This one was the easiest to convert because I did most of the work on the prototype. Just replacing content with MT tags and that pretty much did it. I also turned the main navigation into a php include for easier maintenance.
This required a bit of styling work. First, the definition list I wanted to use for the Previously Inspired section was too ambitious and just wasn't going to work so I swapped into H5 and P tags. After a little styling I moved onto the Search elements and laid them out (found out that to get the submit button and search box to line up you need to set the vertical-align on both to middle). Another fairly quick swap-out of content for MT Tags and I was ready to rock.
This was super quick. Just changing out some of the MT Tags, remove the category listing at the bottom, and publish.
Damn, this was much tougher than I thought it would be. Moving around some of the tags was the easy part. Figuring out how to get the Comments to alternate styles, not. I think I spent the better part of my total time on this figuring out how to do the simple arithmetic in PHP of testing the comment number is divisible by two (please note, I am not a great programmer. I can get it to work, even work well, but until now I had only come close to mastering Javascript). After some research I found the fantastic modulus operator! After that, it was a simple if/else statement and I was set. I had already reconstructed the comment form with labels on the current site, so I plugged it in, did a little more styling and voila, Individual Archive. I also used my first MTElse tag to show when I've disabled the comments.
By far what should have been the easiest was the most time consuming because I was missing the clearing div on the Wrapper element and my background was MIA. Before I discovered the true problem here, I had researched every which way to get the preview out of the CGI, even going so far as to figuring out how to rebuild this function myself in PHP. Through a stroke of luck, I saw the error and wasted a days worth of research (though Dave Shea says he's got a way to actually do it, and I'm looking forward to his write-up when he's got it done).
As promised, I turned this into a separate weblog and am including the content on the homepage as a PHP include. I chose the PHP include over MTSQL because I didn't want to have to rebuild the homepage every time I added new links. The main archive page was an easy adaptation of the master archive index template, and I decided the best way to continuously archive was monthly listings, no individual archives.
Outside of some small formatting and graphic work for final touches, the big tasks left are all the static content (About, Contact, Portfolio, Truly Inspired) and another weblog for the Recommended section. Whew, this is definitely my most complex MT site yet.
I did just some clean-up on the comment links (removing the pop-ups), and adding a simple navigation in to tie the site over until a full nav can be put in.
It's been over a week, and I needed to do something to keep my site moving forward. So I implemented a few little measures, and plan to revisit my "Fun with Design Tools" series so I can keep the development of this site moving.
To keep the Design Updates in a separate log, but also incorporate them into the main site, I learned how to use Brad Choate's MTSQL plugin.
I wanted to keep a running log of design updates separate from my actual weblog because I don't feel the little updates have a place in the big log. But I wanted to keep track of them somewhere and make that available for others to see.
I thought of using another category, and find a way to exclude it from showing up. As I researched this options, I came across Brad's SQL plug-in and I have to say that it is a stroke of genius. The sheer possibilities this opens up in organizing my website here, and others to follow is astounding by simply being able to bridge the gap.
So I set up a separate log, deeper in the Inspired Nonsense site specifically for logging my updates, and used MTSQL to pull in the EntryBody of the latest update, as well as the date from this MT log, into the homepage of the other as an update.
I'm almost certain I will end up using this plug-in again as I continue my design process.
I swaped the columns on the page so the links are on the right, placing the focus of the site on the content.
It seemed that most weblogs I've seen have their content on the right hand side. While the left hand side of the screen seems apt for navigations on most sites, it attracts too much attention on weblogs and takes away from the focus of the page, the log.
I like the page much better this way, and I think it will stick for the final design.
It took me a little bit to implement, but I changed the default file-naming conventions for MT using a method from Elise.
While there are varying degrees of implementation of this method, most weblogs I frequent had one thing in common, legible URLs. And while the legible filenames are a good boon to usability and minor help with SEO, the real reason I did this was to automatically organize all my entries in folders by category. A nice structural cohesion will make it much easier to manage this content in the future if I decide to delete entire categories, or anything else I can't think of right now.
So, for the code copiers here's what I put in place:
For the Individual Archive I used:
<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1" $>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html
For the Category Archive I used
<$MTArchiveCategory dirify="1" $>/index.html
I had to clean up the look of the site a little, I just couldn't stand waiting until I had my plan in place.
Today I moved all of the fonts in the stylesheet to "em"s. There are many options for font-sizing on the web:Keyword Based, Pixel Based, Picas, Points, you get the idea.
My favorite technique as of late is prescribed by Owen Briggs, that calls for setting the body element to a percentage (76% is his recommendation after testing 276 configurations of platforms and browsers), and using em units in CSS to define all of the font-sizes on the page. I like how it changes uniformly with the text-size setting in the browser. I've also starting to use ems for my margin settings.
I've never actually used this function of MovableType before, so there is more work to be done, but I've created a list on the left hand for Categories, and have started using them for my entries.
I still need to get a plan up here, even a very informal one, but I think the next step will be defining document structures for all parts of my site and adding some very important content to the homepage (namely Internet Radio).
Till next time...