![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I just reloaded my Tumblr dashboard and they moved all the things around without warning. It's quite disorienting.
WTF, Tumblr?
Sep. 9th, 2011 20:39How do I make the super annoying confetti background on my Tumblr dashboard stop? Can I turn this off? I could live with their 10 billionth post announcement on top, but not the moving color spots all over the screen. Otherwise I need to figure out how to stop this moving background (actually not just a simple background, it moves all over their buttons too) from displaying through my Firefox somehow. Why are they doing this to their users?!?
ETA: I figured out that this stops if you don't just reload the dashboard, but leave (like going to your Tumblr) and then come back. Then the announcement and the horrible confetti goes away.
ETA: I figured out that this stops if you don't just reload the dashboard, but leave (like going to your Tumblr) and then come back. Then the announcement and the horrible confetti goes away.
so much interface fail
Oct. 21st, 2010 20:50So I tried to turn my Santa!Cthulhu image into a basic greeting card, but their site just doesn't work right with any of my browsers. That is in my Firefox some of their links don't aren't clickable, even though I have Flash and Javascript and everything enabled, and in Opera the links work but the OK buttons in their pop-up windows don't. And Konqueror didn't show the pop-up thingies correctly from the beginning. At first I thought, ok, the Firefox on my laptop is very old, so I tried on my desktop, which has the current Firefox, but no luck with that one either.
But I'm not easily deterred so I did manage create an account and to upload the image, finally, but then when I wanted to do the simplest product design, i.e. pick a card, put the image on the card sized so that it fits, without even any text or borders or stuff, it constantly did weird things. Like I wrangled it right, and clicked the save, but then back in the overview it had saved empty. And then when I finally managed to put an image onto a card, and made it public (or so I thought), it didn't show on the shop page, which I thought was because I got a page error in the middle and had to reload. However, it seems that was just a time delay, but they could have said that it takes time to show up.
Also, whenever I clicked the help popup to explain something I only got the general main help page. Like there would be a link "what is such-and-such" to explain a function and then I didn't get somewhere that even had the term on the page.
However, I did manage to create a Santa!Cthulhu card, and I think one can replace the country code in the zazzle URL with the one most convenient, like pick the .com ending for the US store.
But I'm not easily deterred so I did manage create an account and to upload the image, finally, but then when I wanted to do the simplest product design, i.e. pick a card, put the image on the card sized so that it fits, without even any text or borders or stuff, it constantly did weird things. Like I wrangled it right, and clicked the save, but then back in the overview it had saved empty. And then when I finally managed to put an image onto a card, and made it public (or so I thought), it didn't show on the shop page, which I thought was because I got a page error in the middle and had to reload. However, it seems that was just a time delay, but they could have said that it takes time to show up.
Also, whenever I clicked the help popup to explain something I only got the general main help page. Like there would be a link "what is such-and-such" to explain a function and then I didn't get somewhere that even had the term on the page.
However, I did manage to create a Santa!Cthulhu card, and I think one can replace the country code in the zazzle URL with the one most convenient, like pick the .com ending for the US store.
I've barely gotten used to the deviantArt site arrangements (I whined about my problems navigating dA before), and now they changed their profile page layout and added new modules and widgets and stuff. Meep. It's not that I think it's worse than before, actually I haven't used it long enough yet to decide whether its functionality improved or not, it's just that I had a hard time with the site to begin with, and now they changed things on me, when I've just mostly knew where what was.
OTOH you find cool things there, like this comic page by ursulav, an excerpt of a hypothetical comic from a children's book. I now want this "Empire of Feathers" comic about "an alternate universe where birds ruled the world, and it was dark and gritty and had lots of battle scenes and intrigue and poisonings and magic, and a clan of rooster assassins that wore cloaks made of their victim's feathers" to really exist so badly. Assassin roosters!
OTOH you find cool things there, like this comic page by ursulav, an excerpt of a hypothetical comic from a children's book. I now want this "Empire of Feathers" comic about "an alternate universe where birds ruled the world, and it was dark and gritty and had lots of battle scenes and intrigue and poisonings and magic, and a clan of rooster assassins that wore cloaks made of their victim's feathers" to really exist so badly. Assassin roosters!
deviantArt?
Nov. 24th, 2008 22:55I was in the mood to look at some fanart and decided to browse deviantArt, also wondering whether it might be good as another place to post my stuff. So I just went to the site, and previously I've always followed links to an artist or a picture, and I wasn't too thrilled with the site design then, but on that level it works okay. But how does anyone cope with this site design on a more general level? Or is it just me? It drives me crazy. Though I guess you get used to everything eventually, right?
Of course it could be worse. DA has at least general categories, and fanart is separate (though it would help if the individual fandoms were separated more as well but I guess it's because it's more general use, not just fandom), and there is a search engine, but I still find DA hard to use. For example I found out that the group accounts I have seen linked actually don't exist officially in the site's infrastructure. That I learned from the FAQ after I had been looking like for ten minutes or so to find a section for group galleries (I thought it might be easier to find fandoms that way), and was completely baffled. Apparently they exist unofficially through more than one person using an account somehow. At least that explains why these groups aren't more common. I expect it must be rather nightmarish from a maintenance and security standpoint for group owners to have to share the main password and not have different right levels or something like that.
Still, those of you more familiar with the site, do you recommend getting an account there? Is the function where you watch artists userfriendly? Does posting stuff there reach a different audience than LJ or is more of a wash? I mean, I'd cope with obnoxious interfaces for the potential of even a small amount of extra feedback. *g* Any opinions on the site?
Of course it could be worse. DA has at least general categories, and fanart is separate (though it would help if the individual fandoms were separated more as well but I guess it's because it's more general use, not just fandom), and there is a search engine, but I still find DA hard to use. For example I found out that the group accounts I have seen linked actually don't exist officially in the site's infrastructure. That I learned from the FAQ after I had been looking like for ten minutes or so to find a section for group galleries (I thought it might be easier to find fandoms that way), and was completely baffled. Apparently they exist unofficially through more than one person using an account somehow. At least that explains why these groups aren't more common. I expect it must be rather nightmarish from a maintenance and security standpoint for group owners to have to share the main password and not have different right levels or something like that.
Still, those of you more familiar with the site, do you recommend getting an account there? Is the function where you watch artists userfriendly? Does posting stuff there reach a different audience than LJ or is more of a wash? I mean, I'd cope with obnoxious interfaces for the potential of even a small amount of extra feedback. *g* Any opinions on the site?
wtf, photobucket?
Nov. 6th, 2008 11:55What the frell did photobucket do to their image upload? It's been a few months since I last uploaded a photo to my account, but I never had a problem, though their flash(?)-thingy for bulk uploading never worked for me. But now I click on the upload button, and a small window with the title bar "select files" pops up, but I don't actually see anything in the window, just some wildly flickering movement, and then my browser crashes.
What is wrong with these people? Why did they have to break their site?
Are there other ways to upload to photobucket, like FF extensions or something, that don't use the website? Or do I just have to stop using their site entirely?
ETA: After looking at their help I found a way to use the old uploader, which I would have clicked had the link to it been visible in the box at my screen resolution and font size, but it was not, but cut off by the box frame and thus hidden. FAIL, photobucket, FAIL.
What is wrong with these people? Why did they have to break their site?
Are there other ways to upload to photobucket, like FF extensions or something, that don't use the website? Or do I just have to stop using their site entirely?
ETA: After looking at their help I found a way to use the old uploader, which I would have clicked had the link to it been visible in the box at my screen resolution and font size, but it was not, but cut off by the box frame and thus hidden. FAIL, photobucket, FAIL.
Because I'm quite frustrated with the delicious redesign (now revamped without dots -- unfortunately they didn't stop there), I looked at alternative services. Only to find them even worse or just too different in purpose.
Netvouz has no tag bundles, though you can sort the bookmarks themselves into hierarchical folders, but it looked still quite promising, except that once I had imported my delicious bookmarks I found out it allows for only twenty tags per bookmark. If you have seen how I tag you see how that would never work for me. Well, at least it had a bulk deletion feature and I could clean up my truncated bookmarks easily and abandon that service.
Similarly, "Mister Wong" looked promising at first (apart from the stupid name) in that it clones delicious' tag bundles feature, and it even has a rudimentary bulk editing function to change the privacy settings and delete more than one bookmark at a time, however it only allows twelve (!?!) tags per bookmark, which is a ridiculously low number for how I use tagging. So I didn't even look further how it compares otherwise.
Simpy, which I used before, has some nice things like the NOT operator for tags or the groups feature for collaborative bookmarking (or it can be used for just for putting your bookmarks into different display sections without needing separate accounts, much like LJ comms, I guess), however that site rather sucks for browsing your bookmarks, because it lacks the tag bundling. Also for me it has performance problems in that it often is even slower to load than delicious, though at least it freezes my browser less often.
Diigo allows you to highlight text and images and put "sticky notes" on websites, which I guess is cool if you research something and want to annotate or keep quotes and important bits from a website, but it is not all that useful for my reading log type of bookmarks. It also has some bulk editing which is always nice, and group features for collaborative bookmarking. It also has something called "lists" to organize things, though I don't quite understand what it is supposed to do, the introduction texts babbles something at you about it being like folders, only not, but also like slideshows...wtf? (It doesn't sound like anything useful anyway, unless I wanted to present a sequence of websites to someone or something like that, which I don't.) It also has no tag bundling, and the browsing of an account via that account's tags is thus inconvenient and limited, much like with Simpy, especiallly with many tags.
ma.gnolia.com's site design is fairly awful, starting with their ugly blossom banner taking up about a fourth of the browser window height on my laptop screen without doing anything useful whatsoever. And I could tolerate that, but it doesn't seem to display the tags a user has at all, not even as a list, nor does it display related tags. I have no idea how people are supposed to browse their bookmarks there, why have tags and then hide them? So that one is out, even though their feature that they automatically cache a copy of the text content of the websites you bookmark is tempting, because obviously this would work around fanfic you bookmark being lost (to yourself anyway, the cached version isn't public) without having to save yourself.
Why isn't there a social bookmarking site that combines the good features, while skipping the crap? I quite liked the simple bookmark and tag display of the old del.icio.us, including the tag bundles for navigation, so it ought to be similar to that, only with bulk editing for bookmarks and tags (with UIs that don't crash), the RSS subscriptions and networking were good too, then on top of that the NOT operator for tags that Simpy has, and the group creation for several people editing one bookmark list would be cool, decent search and import/export functions of course, and the caching thing magnolia does to not loose content when it vanishes would be a nice extra.
Sigh.
I guess for now I just hope that del.icio.us will fix the worst of the mess in their new UI, so that the tag bundling stuff stops being broken, and the editing options come back as they were. (To segue into my ongoing rant once again, right now you don't have edit, share or delete links anymore for a bookmark you found by searching through your own -- I have no idea why they removed that, it doesn't make any sense. One of the obvious reasons you search through your bookmarks is to find a bookmark you want to do something with, it's not like that is some arcane non-intended usage hack or whatever).
Netvouz has no tag bundles, though you can sort the bookmarks themselves into hierarchical folders, but it looked still quite promising, except that once I had imported my delicious bookmarks I found out it allows for only twenty tags per bookmark. If you have seen how I tag you see how that would never work for me. Well, at least it had a bulk deletion feature and I could clean up my truncated bookmarks easily and abandon that service.
Similarly, "Mister Wong" looked promising at first (apart from the stupid name) in that it clones delicious' tag bundles feature, and it even has a rudimentary bulk editing function to change the privacy settings and delete more than one bookmark at a time, however it only allows twelve (!?!) tags per bookmark, which is a ridiculously low number for how I use tagging. So I didn't even look further how it compares otherwise.
Simpy, which I used before, has some nice things like the NOT operator for tags or the groups feature for collaborative bookmarking (or it can be used for just for putting your bookmarks into different display sections without needing separate accounts, much like LJ comms, I guess), however that site rather sucks for browsing your bookmarks, because it lacks the tag bundling. Also for me it has performance problems in that it often is even slower to load than delicious, though at least it freezes my browser less often.
Diigo allows you to highlight text and images and put "sticky notes" on websites, which I guess is cool if you research something and want to annotate or keep quotes and important bits from a website, but it is not all that useful for my reading log type of bookmarks. It also has some bulk editing which is always nice, and group features for collaborative bookmarking. It also has something called "lists" to organize things, though I don't quite understand what it is supposed to do, the introduction texts babbles something at you about it being like folders, only not, but also like slideshows...wtf? (It doesn't sound like anything useful anyway, unless I wanted to present a sequence of websites to someone or something like that, which I don't.) It also has no tag bundling, and the browsing of an account via that account's tags is thus inconvenient and limited, much like with Simpy, especiallly with many tags.
ma.gnolia.com's site design is fairly awful, starting with their ugly blossom banner taking up about a fourth of the browser window height on my laptop screen without doing anything useful whatsoever. And I could tolerate that, but it doesn't seem to display the tags a user has at all, not even as a list, nor does it display related tags. I have no idea how people are supposed to browse their bookmarks there, why have tags and then hide them? So that one is out, even though their feature that they automatically cache a copy of the text content of the websites you bookmark is tempting, because obviously this would work around fanfic you bookmark being lost (to yourself anyway, the cached version isn't public) without having to save yourself.
Why isn't there a social bookmarking site that combines the good features, while skipping the crap? I quite liked the simple bookmark and tag display of the old del.icio.us, including the tag bundles for navigation, so it ought to be similar to that, only with bulk editing for bookmarks and tags (with UIs that don't crash), the RSS subscriptions and networking were good too, then on top of that the NOT operator for tags that Simpy has, and the group creation for several people editing one bookmark list would be cool, decent search and import/export functions of course, and the caching thing magnolia does to not loose content when it vanishes would be a nice extra.
Sigh.
I guess for now I just hope that del.icio.us will fix the worst of the mess in their new UI, so that the tag bundling stuff stops being broken, and the editing options come back as they were. (To segue into my ongoing rant once again, right now you don't have edit, share or delete links anymore for a bookmark you found by searching through your own -- I have no idea why they removed that, it doesn't make any sense. One of the obvious reasons you search through your bookmarks is to find a bookmark you want to do something with, it's not like that is some arcane non-intended usage hack or whatever).
Some of you may have noticed that I use del.icio.us quite a lot to tag fanfic (unsurprisingly I'm ratcreature there too). I also use a lot of tags, applying the tagging philosophy that you really can't have too many assigned to a story to easier find it again later. The redesigned site tells me it's about 3500 tags now, and I frequently add more.
Now, while I'm a bit dubious about the look of the new design, in particular that in list view the bookmarks, in particular those with many tags (and I tag stories with several dozen sometimes), take more room, I'll probably get used to the more superficial changes. However, that it now doesn't offer you a section with "unbundled tags" is really bad for me. To use recently added tags when they are merely displayed in the huge lists of several thousand other tags is quite impossible.
Their interface to bundle tags has been atrocious before, and drove me crazy (last time I sorted tags I had added into my bundles and changed some it took nearly a *day* and it weren't that many edits), so I only use it to bundle my newly added tags when I have at least some hours to become utterly frustrated, and just use the "unbundled" section to find the more recent ones again. That is now impossible, it seems.
Also, I didn't think this was possible, but the tag bundling interface got *worse*: It now won't load my larger bundles (like the "authors" bundle) at all for editing, and while it does load the smaller bundles, it now jumps you back to the top whenever you clicked on a tag to add it, so you can't even go through the list anymore without scrolling down again and again and again.
Now, while I'm a bit dubious about the look of the new design, in particular that in list view the bookmarks, in particular those with many tags (and I tag stories with several dozen sometimes), take more room, I'll probably get used to the more superficial changes. However, that it now doesn't offer you a section with "unbundled tags" is really bad for me. To use recently added tags when they are merely displayed in the huge lists of several thousand other tags is quite impossible.
Their interface to bundle tags has been atrocious before, and drove me crazy (last time I sorted tags I had added into my bundles and changed some it took nearly a *day* and it weren't that many edits), so I only use it to bundle my newly added tags when I have at least some hours to become utterly frustrated, and just use the "unbundled" section to find the more recent ones again. That is now impossible, it seems.
Also, I didn't think this was possible, but the tag bundling interface got *worse*: It now won't load my larger bundles (like the "authors" bundle) at all for editing, and while it does load the smaller bundles, it now jumps you back to the top whenever you clicked on a tag to add it, so you can't even go through the list anymore without scrolling down again and again and again.
usability issues...
Jun. 3rd, 2008 11:50Over time my AU recs page has grown somewhat large and unwieldy. Since an update is due soon, I've been wondering whether users would prefer to have my AU recs broken up in separate fandom pages, i.e. all fandoms with say more than twenty stories recced would get their own page, the rest would stay on a page for other fandoms in their own sections, as it is now. The main AU recs page would become an index linking to the fandom pages/sections, and have a "Recently Added" summary for the last update, like the update posts I do to my LJ, so that people wouldn't have to click further than the main page for the just latest recs. It would mean more clicking to see all recs, but smaller pages.
So which option would you prefer? After all, I'm not the one using the page.
[Poll #1198501]
So which option would you prefer? After all, I'm not the one using the page.
[Poll #1198501]
Back in ancient times (okay, three years ago or so) I used to have my website setup in a way so that images like sketches or fanart and such displayed in a new pop up browser window, because personally when navigating thumbnails that just open an image, not a real page, I like not to go away from the gallery page. However I then did a a poll on this topic, and the vast majority preferred thumbnails to open the image in the same window. So I changed my site to match that preference.
However now I just found a neat javascript thing, Lightbox JS, that displays images in an overlay on the same page. If you surf with javascript turned off it'll behave just like before, so it doesn't break the basic navigation or anything like that, it's just an extra. And I'm considering to switch my site's picture galleries to this. To show the effect I created a copy of my fanart page using the script, so that you can see the effect. Just click on a link to a piece of fanart, and if you have javascript enabled, it ought to show the image in an overlay with the page underneath darkened (and please tell me if it doesn't work for you for some reason, or if there are any display problems, like distortions or whatever).
So given this alternative to the images simply opening in the same window, and having to use the back button, which do you like better?
[Poll #1133237]
ETA: Just to clarify, this script does not prevent you from opening the image in a tab with a different click (at least that still works for me, it was the first thing I tried), nor does it hinder saving images or any of the other annoying things some image display gadgets will do.
However now I just found a neat javascript thing, Lightbox JS, that displays images in an overlay on the same page. If you surf with javascript turned off it'll behave just like before, so it doesn't break the basic navigation or anything like that, it's just an extra. And I'm considering to switch my site's picture galleries to this. To show the effect I created a copy of my fanart page using the script, so that you can see the effect. Just click on a link to a piece of fanart, and if you have javascript enabled, it ought to show the image in an overlay with the page underneath darkened (and please tell me if it doesn't work for you for some reason, or if there are any display problems, like distortions or whatever).
So given this alternative to the images simply opening in the same window, and having to use the back button, which do you like better?
[Poll #1133237]
ETA: Just to clarify, this script does not prevent you from opening the image in a tab with a different click (at least that still works for me, it was the first thing I tried), nor does it hinder saving images or any of the other annoying things some image display gadgets will do.
webdesign question
Jan. 17th, 2008 18:00In the eternal struggle to procrastinate cleaning my kitchen, I've been thinking about redesigning my website. Because starting a complicated, complete overhaul is more like actual work, I decided to just make my very bare-bones crossover recs look a bit nicer. Currently it's all in one column, first the list of fandoms linking to the sections below, then come the actual recs. I thought it might look nicer in two column, with the fandom list to the left, the recs on the right, like this. However before I commit to this, I thought I might solicit opinions, on which you like better. Thus a quick poll:
[Poll #1122802]
[Poll #1122802]
accessibility...
Oct. 18th, 2006 10:55So I've seen Missed the Saturday Dance by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zoetrope recced several times on my f-list, and I get why people like the multimedia, and it's kind of cool and what not, and I like a mix of images and text (or I wouldn't love comics) and the video and sound is neat too. And I love AUs anyway. However, that choice to display much of the story text that is letters as graphics may be visually cool, but it really grates on me that the images don't come with an alt-attribute or a link to a text version of the letters.
I get that full transcriptions of video, sound, and image parts in a multimedia story for accessibility are not very practical, and it's not like I expect fanfic to go that far, but those letters are already text. And text that is an integral part of the narrative too. And it's just too small to read comfortably for me on a screen, especially with the typewriter effect, and I'm not even visually impaired or anything. Some stories displaying letters like that provide accessible alternatives,sheafrotherdon for example did in one of her Farm in Iowa stories, and I very much liked that, since I could take a look at the visual of the letter, then read the text in a comfortable font at a comfortable size.
With as much work as went into the presentation Missed the Saturday Dance, and I agree that it looks very nice indeed, how difficult could it have been to provide a link to a transcribed text of the all those letters as well, and make it possible for more people to enjoy it?
zoetrope recced several times on my f-list, and I get why people like the multimedia, and it's kind of cool and what not, and I like a mix of images and text (or I wouldn't love comics) and the video and sound is neat too. And I love AUs anyway. However, that choice to display much of the story text that is letters as graphics may be visually cool, but it really grates on me that the images don't come with an alt-attribute or a link to a text version of the letters. I get that full transcriptions of video, sound, and image parts in a multimedia story for accessibility are not very practical, and it's not like I expect fanfic to go that far, but those letters are already text. And text that is an integral part of the narrative too. And it's just too small to read comfortably for me on a screen, especially with the typewriter effect, and I'm not even visually impaired or anything. Some stories displaying letters like that provide accessible alternatives,
sheafrotherdon for example did in one of her Farm in Iowa stories, and I very much liked that, since I could take a look at the visual of the letter, then read the text in a comfortable font at a comfortable size. With as much work as went into the presentation Missed the Saturday Dance, and I agree that it looks very nice indeed, how difficult could it have been to provide a link to a transcribed text of the all those letters as well, and make it possible for more people to enjoy it?
web design that sucks...
Oct. 12th, 2006 02:05The Stargate Fan Awards site has to be one of the worst designed sites I've seen in a while. Having seen a bunch of buttons for that award recently I figured I might check the site out, looking whether I maybe missed some cool story. But when I went there it was impossible to navigate the site.
First, it displayed all wrong, and none of the links worked. Relatively quickly it became apparent that you can only navigate it with Javascript turned on. So okay, that sucks, but whatever, I turned it on for the site and at least the links and navigation then worked. But I couldn't figure out where I ought to go to see the list of stories from the main menu. Clicking on "categories" and it's many submenus only leads to explanations for those, clicking on "Award Areas" is similarly fruitless as it also explains the award, clicking on help explains to me at length issues of the voting process or whatever in which I have no interest since I don't intend to participate, clicking on "archives" only leads to story lists for previous years...
I mean, WTF?! I'm not usually bad at navigating websites, not even badly designed ones, but I've looked through their navigation menu and its submenus for almost ten minutes now and still couldn't find any list of nominated stories.
ETA: I have now found long lists of ineligible stories, and really, I think it says something profound about the site that it is easier (for relative values of easy) to find the lists of stories that people can't vote on than the list of nominated stories...
ETA 2: Success at last! There was a button that you could click to get to the nominee listings on the main page, only it was in an older news update from August some news entries down and thus "below the fold" on my screen so I didn't see it at first, as I hadn't scrolled down two pages to examine old updates (before utter desperation and stubbornness to beat the obnoxious site led me to it, that is), having stupidly assumed I could find the relevant things in the actual navigation area...
First, it displayed all wrong, and none of the links worked. Relatively quickly it became apparent that you can only navigate it with Javascript turned on. So okay, that sucks, but whatever, I turned it on for the site and at least the links and navigation then worked. But I couldn't figure out where I ought to go to see the list of stories from the main menu. Clicking on "categories" and it's many submenus only leads to explanations for those, clicking on "Award Areas" is similarly fruitless as it also explains the award, clicking on help explains to me at length issues of the voting process or whatever in which I have no interest since I don't intend to participate, clicking on "archives" only leads to story lists for previous years...
I mean, WTF?! I'm not usually bad at navigating websites, not even badly designed ones, but I've looked through their navigation menu and its submenus for almost ten minutes now and still couldn't find any list of nominated stories.
ETA: I have now found long lists of ineligible stories, and really, I think it says something profound about the site that it is easier (for relative values of easy) to find the lists of stories that people can't vote on than the list of nominated stories...
ETA 2: Success at last! There was a button that you could click to get to the nominee listings on the main page, only it was in an older news update from August some news entries down and thus "below the fold" on my screen so I didn't see it at first, as I hadn't scrolled down two pages to examine old updates (before utter desperation and stubbornness to beat the obnoxious site led me to it, that is), having stupidly assumed I could find the relevant things in the actual navigation area...
I have been wondering about the design of the fanart corner of my website. I don't have that many fanart pieces up, but slowly they have gotten more numerous (okay, so it's not even twenty, but then I'm hardly prolific) and I wondered whether I should somehow split or reorganize the section into subsections.
Right now the images are sorted simply by reverse date, with the newest on top, with a smallish (120x120px) preview next to a detailed description of the piece, all in the fanart section of my page for fandom stuff. So you get any picture with just two clicks from my index page. Obviously the more pictures I add, the longer the page takes to load, because of the previews, but otoh the previews are just about 5-7kb each, so personally I would prefer having all on one page rather than having to click three times to get to the art even for twice as many pictures (which at the pace of my fanart production are unlikely to materialize any time soon), but then my internet connection is moderately fast.
[Poll #817192]
Right now the images are sorted simply by reverse date, with the newest on top, with a smallish (120x120px) preview next to a detailed description of the piece, all in the fanart section of my page for fandom stuff. So you get any picture with just two clicks from my index page. Obviously the more pictures I add, the longer the page takes to load, because of the previews, but otoh the previews are just about 5-7kb each, so personally I would prefer having all on one page rather than having to click three times to get to the art even for twice as many pictures (which at the pace of my fanart production are unlikely to materialize any time soon), but then my internet connection is moderately fast.
[Poll #817192]
With each update of my recs page I run a link checker as part of the validation, using the W3C online tools. However a good number of sites, both archives and LJs, have robot exclusion rules, so I can't readily see whether the stories in question are really still there with the W3C link checker. Initially it wasn't a huge bother to check them manually, but by now it's over sixty links. Do any of you who maintain largish recs pages or other link collections have a good strategy for this or an autochecker tool working with a website that's not excluded as a robot?
I mean something like the bookmark editors in webbrowsers that go through links and then show you the broken ones, only something that would check based on a website. I assume html editors or website tools might have such a function, but I code my page simply in Emacs with the help of html and php editing modes for highlighting and such, and I have never needed any specialized programs. I tried one html editor that was bundled with my distro and had been installed automatically as part of the standard set-up (Quanta?), but it all seemed rather more complicated than I wanted to get into for just checking a bunch of links, i.e. I couldn't get the link checker function to work properly with my file at first try. I have no idea whether that was because of the file not being plain html but php mixed with html or something else, but I decided I'd really prefer something simpler.
So how do you check your links?
I mean something like the bookmark editors in webbrowsers that go through links and then show you the broken ones, only something that would check based on a website. I assume html editors or website tools might have such a function, but I code my page simply in Emacs with the help of html and php editing modes for highlighting and such, and I have never needed any specialized programs. I tried one html editor that was bundled with my distro and had been installed automatically as part of the standard set-up (Quanta?), but it all seemed rather more complicated than I wanted to get into for just checking a bunch of links, i.e. I couldn't get the link checker function to work properly with my file at first try. I have no idea whether that was because of the file not being plain html but php mixed with html or something else, but I decided I'd really prefer something simpler.
So how do you check your links?
I know that links opening in a new window are reviled in most circumstances, and generally I agree with that, however personally when navigating fanart sites and the thumbnails just open an image, not a real page, I like if those open in a new window, so that's what I do on my site. However, it occurs to me that I may be in a minority with that preference, so I'm wondering whether I should change it to the image opening in the same window. Thus a poll:
[Poll #653473]
[Poll #653473]
Some websites really put my recent worries about the look of my page on other platforms into perspective. For example I don't think it will display as black on black without anything visible at all on any kind of platform, like this page that I just visited because of a link in wereadshite does for me in three browsers I tried. I even tried highlighting all text, and then I see some tiny, tiny text in one corner that I can't read either because it's not only really tiny, the lines are also overlapping each other. There don't seem to be any links either, at least my cursor didn't change when I hovered over the page. I have no idea what it is supposed to look like, but I'm fairly certain it's not black on black... When I look at the source code it seems that there is supposed to be an image map, that I don't see, probably because the site is just too broken, I mean whoever (or whatever) coded this didn't even put in an opening or closing html-tag in this document.
Though determined to beat the odds and still be able to unearth the content I finally turned to Lynx, which gave the most viewable result, because you can follow the links of an image map. So I was able to go to the rec page itself, which was legible in Lynx however presented the same black on black look (albeit with dark blue links) in all other browsers.
Somehow this makes me feel much better about my site...
wereadshite does for me in three browsers I tried. I even tried highlighting all text, and then I see some tiny, tiny text in one corner that I can't read either because it's not only really tiny, the lines are also overlapping each other. There don't seem to be any links either, at least my cursor didn't change when I hovered over the page. I have no idea what it is supposed to look like, but I'm fairly certain it's not black on black... When I look at the source code it seems that there is supposed to be an image map, that I don't see, probably because the site is just too broken, I mean whoever (or whatever) coded this didn't even put in an opening or closing html-tag in this document. Though determined to beat the odds and still be able to unearth the content I finally turned to Lynx, which gave the most viewable result, because you can follow the links of an image map. So I was able to go to the rec page itself, which was legible in Lynx however presented the same black on black look (albeit with dark blue links) in all other browsers.
Somehow this makes me feel much better about my site...
new index page layout
Jun. 24th, 2003 03:20In a desperate effort to procrastinate doing anything productive, I fiddled with the layout of my index page today. Like for hours. It now looks simple, and not like it could have taken hours to get there from my previous layout, but I actually tried a lot of stuff (most of which didn't work like I thought it should), and once again I found out more about CSS quirks than I wanted to now. It looks okay for me in Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror for Linux, and works in Lynx as well. I hope the layout isn't broken other browsers.
(As a side note, is this a new "feature" that the LJ spell check won't accept contractions anymore? I think it's rather silly that it suggests "USN, INS, ins, sin, ISBN,..." for "isn" just because it doesn't recognize "isn't" or "doesn't" anymore.)
(As a side note, is this a new "feature" that the LJ spell check won't accept contractions anymore? I think it's rather silly that it suggests "USN, INS, ins, sin, ISBN,..." for "isn" just because it doesn't recognize "isn't" or "doesn't" anymore.)
new blog layout...
Jun. 14th, 2003 03:21My life, okay new layouts for my pages, would be so much easier if I hadn't decided to be consequent about not mixing design and content and only position with CSS not with tables. It's not that I think CSS positioning is difficult in its concepts, and it's not like I want especially difficult designs either, or micromanage every letter position and line break. What gets to me is when I have no idea why a browser decides on rendering margins and paddings that I never put there, or ignores other margins altogether for some elements, when the design should work.
Anyway, I decided to give my blog a new layout, and after some wrangling, and careful strategizing for how to choose margins etc., it now looks basically like I want it in the three browsers I have (Mozilla, Opera and the KDE browser, all for Linux), and without resorting to voodoo-like CSS hacks too.
So now I'm curious whether it looks like it is supposed to in Windows or Mac browsers. (Well newer ones anyway, obviously it can't look good in browsers which don't support CSS positioning, but then my site isn't designed with Netscape 4 in mind, in those cases the pages are only readable, but don't look nice). So if anyone has a minute to take a look, it would be cool to have reassurance that it doesn't look broken (opinions on the layout in general are of course welcome too).
It should be fairly obvious what the intended layout is and what glitches. It's a simple two column layout with a picture on top, the whole thing is fixed width to fit the picture size and ought to be centered in the browser window, the title is supposed to be positioned in the lower right of the picture, and obviously the borders and such are supposed to be regular lines without strange gaps or shifts.
Anyway, I decided to give my blog a new layout, and after some wrangling, and careful strategizing for how to choose margins etc., it now looks basically like I want it in the three browsers I have (Mozilla, Opera and the KDE browser, all for Linux), and without resorting to voodoo-like CSS hacks too.
So now I'm curious whether it looks like it is supposed to in Windows or Mac browsers. (Well newer ones anyway, obviously it can't look good in browsers which don't support CSS positioning, but then my site isn't designed with Netscape 4 in mind, in those cases the pages are only readable, but don't look nice). So if anyone has a minute to take a look, it would be cool to have reassurance that it doesn't look broken (opinions on the layout in general are of course welcome too).
It should be fairly obvious what the intended layout is and what glitches. It's a simple two column layout with a picture on top, the whole thing is fixed width to fit the picture size and ought to be centered in the browser window, the title is supposed to be positioned in the lower right of the picture, and obviously the borders and such are supposed to be regular lines without strange gaps or shifts.
(no subject)
Apr. 19th, 2003 01:29In case anyone is interested in "beta-testing" the fledgling beginnings of the Batverse resource some more (any kinds of comments and suggestions are welcome), I used some of today for data entry (yay for public holidays *g*), and now have cataloged Gotham Knights #14, #15, #16, and #17, a page with all entries for that series is here.
ETA: I'm thinking that I maybe should add a "continuity references" section in each entry, to list specific references to previous events (those that I notice and can trace to their source anyway)...
ETA: I'm thinking that I maybe should add a "continuity references" section in each entry, to list specific references to previous events (those that I notice and can trace to their source anyway)...
(no subject)
Apr. 16th, 2003 19:40I'm still testing the options for using Movable Type as a tool for managing a Batman resource site, and I have now an example entry to illustrate how I imagine the information on a comic to be organized. It's backdated so that the entry date matches the publishing date, and thus it doesn't appear in the main index, but for example an entry for the first Nightwing Annual might look like this.
Obviously the whole blog setup and design is still very much in the draft state, but I thought it might be useful to offer an entry with actual data to illustrate the concept some more.
Has anyone any opinions?
Obviously the whole blog setup and design is still very much in the draft state, but I thought it might be useful to offer an entry with actual data to illustrate the concept some more.
Has anyone any opinions?
In a previous entry I noticed that I don't know any Batverse resource that cross-references character/canon details with the comic issues, or character biographies that cite the source for every fact they collect.
Now the scary thing is, that I'm seriously thinking about starting such a site, that is at least to give it a try. Obviously the site would start very small and not that useful, but on the other hand, because I've only begun to read and collect the Batman series it might continously grow as I read the issues, and I don't have a massive re-reading backlog yet that has to be entered, as long as I'd really update the site with any relevant Batman title I read. So at the beginning it would be very incomplete, but after all general character overviews and complete series and character appearance indexes already exist elsewhere, it's the connection between the character details and the comic issues that I'd like to see somewhere.
So last night I've pondered the best way to structure and maintain such a site to make it flexible, expandable, searchable and easy to update as it grows. I guess theoretically the best long term thing would be to create a customized database with a sound structure and then have php scripts that create and format whatever kind of output one wants from that database. However I have no time or inclination to write a sort of php/database application that is ideally suited for the task of organizing comic canon for the web. The other extreme, to create and update every page manually with each additional comic is also impractical. It might be the easiest for a few comics, but as soon as a few dozen comics are involved it would become unwieldy fast.
The main problem is that I know I won't update a site if each update has to be some massive effort in formatting and cross-linking, especially not if the aim is to simply sit down after each issue I read and compile some brief notes. That's why I'm so adverse to a completely manual site organization.
Then I thought that maybe a blog system with categories (and the potential for allowing more than one poster) like Movable Type could be set up in a way that was at least usable for such a purpose, perhaps every now and then enhanced by manual creation of some summary info pages. My basic idea so far is something like this:
Every comic would get an entry, all those entries formatted in the same way, with certain "sections" filled out for every comic (like a section for characters so that searches for minor characters for example give as results all entries and thus comics where they appear, though it obviously needs some thought of how to best organize the info), then all relevant categories would be assigned to the entry, for example categories like "Dick Grayson/Childhood" or "Batman/Origin Story", things like that. Categories that help to organize canon/character details in useful sub-sections. Then the blog archives would be set to be based on the categories, so that then someone could click "Batman/Origin Story" and all entries with comics that refer to that would be listed. That wouldn't be the best possible organization, because inside each category the comics would be listed based on the entry date, not based on any internal or publishing chronology, though it might be a possibility to give each entry the original publishing date of the comic, instead of the date the entry is created. OTOH the disadvantage of backdating is that at least in Movable Type the entry won't show up on the index page even if it is new. On yet another hand that way the index page would only show fairly recent comics, and the others would be only accessible through the archives, and the implemented calendar functions could be utilized for publishing date searches/browsing and such.
Still, even if I decided on creating "summary pages" manually every now and then to compile the data in more specific ways, it might still be useful that this way every comic had an entry in the archive, I could link to directly.
I think one kind of category should be the series title, and since for me the main characters of interest are Dick Grayson/Nightwing and Bruce Wayne/Batman, I'd like the categories "Childhood", "Origin Story", "Romances", "Trivia" and something like "Important Character Development/Turning Point" (to mark really central issues for the character arcs) for both of them, but I'm not sure what other categories ought to be there.
So now I'm wondering whether a site design like that would be usable... Obviously suggestions and advice are welcome.
Now the scary thing is, that I'm seriously thinking about starting such a site, that is at least to give it a try. Obviously the site would start very small and not that useful, but on the other hand, because I've only begun to read and collect the Batman series it might continously grow as I read the issues, and I don't have a massive re-reading backlog yet that has to be entered, as long as I'd really update the site with any relevant Batman title I read. So at the beginning it would be very incomplete, but after all general character overviews and complete series and character appearance indexes already exist elsewhere, it's the connection between the character details and the comic issues that I'd like to see somewhere.
So last night I've pondered the best way to structure and maintain such a site to make it flexible, expandable, searchable and easy to update as it grows. I guess theoretically the best long term thing would be to create a customized database with a sound structure and then have php scripts that create and format whatever kind of output one wants from that database. However I have no time or inclination to write a sort of php/database application that is ideally suited for the task of organizing comic canon for the web. The other extreme, to create and update every page manually with each additional comic is also impractical. It might be the easiest for a few comics, but as soon as a few dozen comics are involved it would become unwieldy fast.
The main problem is that I know I won't update a site if each update has to be some massive effort in formatting and cross-linking, especially not if the aim is to simply sit down after each issue I read and compile some brief notes. That's why I'm so adverse to a completely manual site organization.
Then I thought that maybe a blog system with categories (and the potential for allowing more than one poster) like Movable Type could be set up in a way that was at least usable for such a purpose, perhaps every now and then enhanced by manual creation of some summary info pages. My basic idea so far is something like this:
Every comic would get an entry, all those entries formatted in the same way, with certain "sections" filled out for every comic (like a section for characters so that searches for minor characters for example give as results all entries and thus comics where they appear, though it obviously needs some thought of how to best organize the info), then all relevant categories would be assigned to the entry, for example categories like "Dick Grayson/Childhood" or "Batman/Origin Story", things like that. Categories that help to organize canon/character details in useful sub-sections. Then the blog archives would be set to be based on the categories, so that then someone could click "Batman/Origin Story" and all entries with comics that refer to that would be listed. That wouldn't be the best possible organization, because inside each category the comics would be listed based on the entry date, not based on any internal or publishing chronology, though it might be a possibility to give each entry the original publishing date of the comic, instead of the date the entry is created. OTOH the disadvantage of backdating is that at least in Movable Type the entry won't show up on the index page even if it is new. On yet another hand that way the index page would only show fairly recent comics, and the others would be only accessible through the archives, and the implemented calendar functions could be utilized for publishing date searches/browsing and such.
Still, even if I decided on creating "summary pages" manually every now and then to compile the data in more specific ways, it might still be useful that this way every comic had an entry in the archive, I could link to directly.
I think one kind of category should be the series title, and since for me the main characters of interest are Dick Grayson/Nightwing and Bruce Wayne/Batman, I'd like the categories "Childhood", "Origin Story", "Romances", "Trivia" and something like "Important Character Development/Turning Point" (to mark really central issues for the character arcs) for both of them, but I'm not sure what other categories ought to be there.
So now I'm wondering whether a site design like that would be usable... Obviously suggestions and advice are welcome.
