{"id":16488,"date":"2012-07-12T12:46:52","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T17:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=16488"},"modified":"2012-07-12T13:18:15","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T18:18:15","slug":"this-dang-website-iii-dang-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=16488","title":{"rendered":"This Dang Website III: Dang Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"

The site overhaul continues. I apologize for the upheaval. I think we’re nearly done. I want to thank everyone for their patience, bug reports, screen shots, CSS advice, layout advice, and general suggestions. <\/p>\n

The changes so far:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. WordPress itself has been updated.<\/strong> Always dicey, that. I’ve updated a dozen times over the years and it’s only ever broken the site once, but it’s not a fear you forget. Also, the whole “upgrading your database” thing gives me the willies. I make backups of the database now and again, but the thing is a monster and I’m not sure I could actually restore it easily if something went really wrong. Heck, it’s really a challenge to load the database on my local machine where I don’t have to worry about transfer speeds, transaction timeouts, or other arm’s-length concerns.\n<\/li>\n
  2. Plugins are updated.<\/strong> There are a lot of dang plugins on this site. Okay, half of them are mine, but still. The Facebook button shouldn’t grab a giant area of the screen the way it used to, and the comment editing thing seems to have gotten a fresh coat of paint.\n<\/li>\n
  3. The new section icons in the right sidebar should do a much better job of grabbing the eye showcasing the best content.<\/strong> This should let newcomers get a sense of what the site has to offer, and should be better than panning for gold in the archives or fishing in the category list.\n<\/li>\n
  4. Posts are now shown clearly in individual boxes.<\/strong> This solves the “endless scroll of stuff that runs together” vibe the front page had.\n<\/li>\n
  5. The book advertisement is probably going to be nixed.<\/strong> I like it because it shows off two books, but it’s slow loading, Amazon-specific, and eats more space than it should. Also, I’m annoyed that Amazon doesn’t offer an option to just randomly show one book or the other, it MUST animate between the two. I’m still exploring alternatives.\n<\/li>\n
  6. I’m still messing with the ad placement.<\/strong> Since leaving my day-job and having a go at full-time writing, I’ve come to count on the ads. They bring in a couple hundred a month, and we really count on that money. On one hand, I don’t want the ads taking up prime real estate and making the site less engaging, interesting, or welcoming, but I also don’t want to hurt our income. So, I’m moving them around and fooling around with the income \/ intrusiveness tradeoff. In short, I love shoving the skyscraper ad way down the page, but I’m not sure it will get the job done down there. We’ll see.\n<\/li>\n
  7. I’m showcasing videos, comics, programming, and spoiler warning now.<\/strong> Is there any other content that should get its own section? Not just individual posts, but a series or block of posts that could justify having a page of their own? Those section icons on the right are nice, but they will go down in value if I add too many, so they all need to count.\n<\/li>\n
  8. The new background image.<\/strong> It’s a huge improvement, even though I’m not totally crazy about it. I’ll be the first to admit that graphic design is not my strength. After experimenting, I realize that a good, low, contrast, low-visibility image is really useful for making the site “pop”. However, the one I have now is kind of middling. It’s not awful, but a real artist could do better. I do like how the background boxes sort of mimic the post boxes. Also, the current background image is 100k. That’s not a deal-breaker by today’s standards, but it is a bit pricey for such a small thing. It seems to work best when using greyscale values between #AAA and #EEE. Using color, or brightness values out of that range, makes the background distracting and “noisy”.\n<\/li>\n
  9. The logo and dice remain largely unchanged.<\/strong> The dice have been a part of the site since the first or second year. The logo dates all the way back to 2008 or so. I think those are the closest thing I have to “branding”, and so I’m not going to mess with them.\n<\/li>\n
  10. The blue menu bar has been trimmed down and focused on a few small things.<\/strong> I think this is good. The menu bar is for general informational stuff, and the section icons are for showing off content. Previously, these ideas were mixed together. I think the “New Here?” page needs a cleanup.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For future generations who read this post in the archives, here is a screenshot of how the site looks as of this writing:<\/p>\n

    website2012_small.jpg<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The site overhaul continues. I apologize for the upheaval. I think we’re nearly done. I want to thank everyone for their patience, bug reports, screen shots, CSS advice, layout advice, and general suggestions. The changes so far:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}