T w e n t y S i d e d

This has been on my to-do list since Josh and Mumbles began posting here. I need a quick visual way to let the reader know who wrote the post. Usually this is done in a byline, at the end, which I always thought was a bit late for that sort of trivia. I know this is causing confusion for some of you. (And me, to be honest. I’m still not used to the idea of sitting down and finding new posts on my own blog. It’s like finding new groceries in your fridge. Awesome, but disorienting.)

Having a picture of the author is obviously the way to go. I can easily pull up the avatar for the author and make it whatever size I like. We already have the author’s name at the top, but since that says “Shamus” 99.99% of the time, there’s not much reason for people to look there. Then Mumbles says something like, “As a woman, I’m offended by Shamus’ willingness to put words in my mouth!” and people read it in my voice. Suddenly it sounds like I’m [even more] schizophrenic, gender-confused, and an idiot.

Where the picture should be put? I could put it on the right of the title, opposite the category pic. I could put it beside the category pic. I could put it on another line just below the category pic. The important thing is that the header should be as compact as possible, while maintaining some sort of pretense of caring about aesthetics.

Any suggestions? Any blogs that do this properly that I might emulate?

EDIT: IT IS DONE.

I’ve made a plugin that will add the author’s icon to the beginning of every post. Except, it wasn’t that easy. I had to make it search past all the images and youtube embeds and whatever other crap might be sitting at the top of the post, and then scan down and find the first real paragraph of text. And then it has to tuck the icon in between the opening <p> and the actual first letter of prose.

But it seems to work. I might fuss very slightly with the theme, but let’s see how this shakes out. It might break some obscure old posts in my archives. Rather than inspect all of my thousands of posts manually, I’ll just wait for one of the many archive-skimmers to notice and say something.

Thanks for the feedback.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.