About the Second Life™ Section

About this site

I’ve been deleting a whole boatload of useless crap from my site — dead wikis, that broken Gallery installation, that sort of thing.

Pretty soon there’ll be a new gallery up and trucking along, more tightly incorporated into Textpattern. As well as offering nondescript galleries, it should also allow for “photostories” as well.

I’m using a modified script from iain7 which incorporates Slimbook for presentation of pictures. Basically, it pulls images and thumbnails from a subdirectory of your /images directory to create a link or series of links.

What I’ve done is to recode the an7_imgdir tag to format images into a table instead of a long rambling line; this wasn’t too hard and worked first time, thankfully.

On the to-do list, which may involve digging into the JavaScript:

1. Allow per-image descriptive text to be pulled per-line from a text file in the target directory
2. Random images, either as a single-row table or singly (great for excerpts)
3. Offer access to images and image IDs stored in TxP itself (this is ambitious, however)

I still have some kinks to iron out though before I finally exterminate that broken Plogger installation and get ‘em live and kicking. Despite this I could probably migrate the other existing galleries into position now, and creating a gallery page is as simple as writing a new article.

While posting about Acid Factory I checked the comments, and I had my first 3 spams awaiting moderation! I’m so happy.

Hope the background image isn’t too 70s for ya :)

As well as making profound adjustments to the site’s appearance, I’ll also be rethinking how the sections are used and the categories are arranged.

Articles on the site are sorted in three different ways:

1. Sections. As in when you put “/comics/” in the address. So About This Site is supposed to hold updates on and info about this site. I’m also thinking of maybe some more sections but I’m unsure.
2. Categories. Every article can have two category assignments, but right now they’re dreadfully ad-hoc. F’rinstance, this post is under the “Site News”, but really, do I need that category? News is news.
3. Tags. This is a third party add-on, and more flexible. Not that I’m thinking of using solely tags any time soon.

I also had a brainwave (or a braino) about galleries. Most of my images have a little story or explanation behind them, something not easily displayed in a dedicated image gallery. So… why not a “Pictures” section for my photo-blogging?

Anyway, I gotta think about this some more… this evening, between coming home from work and opening the beer.

Anyone trying to comment now won’t get vetted by spamhaus.org any more — it was even blocking me! Hopefully this means folks can now respond to my inane burblings.

Until I get my computer back, the new look for the ol’ BTT won’t be moving much beyond more than what you see now: namely, a more refined, traditional style of solid colours and a basic layout. I intend adding an image background to the title, and maybe a texture around the edges, but right now I need to expand the damn thing to the other sections.

I’ve begun redesigning the Articles section so that it’s not so date-oriented. The problem, of course, is that TextPattern isn’t an article management system, it’s a blog system. There’s a mountain of work to do in re-categorising the articles, and probably more work in hand-carving a front page for the Articles department. Oh well.

Design-wise, I’ve changed the body text from 12pt Georgia (which was too big) to 11pt Book Antiqua. You’ll also notice that the tag cloud has been removed — this leaves more room for articles, and besides, every article has its tags shown anyway.

Regarding recategorisation, I’ll probably start slotting things under one category only. This prevents list bloat and makes things easier to categorise.

As for the overall design, feel and such, I still have a long way to go on that aspect. I’ve been looking, as I’ve said, at other blogs for inspiration, but it’s been lagging.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been moving things around a bit; shoving the main navigation menu to a top bar, a right-hand sidebar relevant to the section, that sort of thing.

Basically, the BTT style is in need of an overhaul. I have to redo a number of aspects of the system, and that will mean the usual broken link fun and redesign of the whole schmeer.

So, what’s on the agenda?

Change the front page

Currently the default “homepage” is a plain list of the most recent public posts. I’d like to change this to a set of lists categorised by section and presented in a nice table.

Fix the Galleries

I upgraded to Plogger v3.0, but the damn thing has issues with session handling that make it unusable from an admin perspective. Currently I’m looking at a TxP plugin that integrates image galleries into the blog. As the ol’ blog seems relatively spam-free, this suits me just fine. May even speed up the database too.

Rearrange the Articles

“Articles” is less bloggy and more like serialised works of fanfic, or random bits of this or that. I’d prefer its index to sort items by topic or theme, and that means more categories and foogling around. Nothing too dramatic.

Change the Style

I’ve been looking at how other blogs present themselves, and I’m trying to extract useful ideas and integrate them into the design. As the page code includes Textile scripting (e.g. enlarging the name of the currently active section in the menu bar) this has been a little challenging to keep in my head.

More importantly, I need to make the site more readable. If I can nail down the presentation, that could mean I can use a larger font for text.

I’ll be banging on this when I have the time anyway. You be warned, d00dz.

Owing to an incredibly heavy spam attack, I have been forced to disable comments until I can upgrade Plogger – I hope it has better comment controls – or find a better gallery system.

There is nothing like checking your email and discovering six hundred notifications from Plogger that all turn out to be spams. Auto-generated, BBcoded, spams. Six hundred.

I am wild.

Last weekend I uploaded a selection of snaps, panoramas and such to my image gallery from my Easter break when I walked the Queen Charlotte Walkway.

Check ‘em out; these babies all have commentary as well.

To honour the addition of icanhascheezburger.com to my links page, one of my other favourite pics from there:

According to the comments, the hippo eyeing the photographer ominously is named Lou, and resides at Homosassa Springs, Florida.

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