An eclectic group of individuals who have two things in common: faith in Jesus and a connection to St. John's College. Here we gather, across time and space, to carry on a dialogue.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
New Template
Posted by Sir Robert at 12:53 PM
Hey everyone,

I've re-written the template for this blog. I mimmicked the old one as closely as I could while making the changes we decided upon. For reasons that barely qualify as such, I switched the side navigation from right to left. If people want it back on the right, let me know, please say so.

Here's a quick rundown of what was changed:
  1. Navbar switched from right to left.
  2. Comments now appear below each post in collapsed form by default. To view a comment, click on it anywhere. You'll know which comment you are hovering over because it will highlight canary yellow.
  3. When you expand a comment, it will have a little button at the bottom that says, "(hide this comment)." Click that to hide that comment. You can also hide it by clicking the same bar you used to show it.
  4. Comments are yellow with a pink-orange border to make it clear what is post and what is comment.
  5. The top item on the side bar is now "Recent Contributions" which includes recent posts as well as their comments. The usage should be obvious.
  6. I've changed some colors a little for stylistic reasons -- I think these are pretty.
  7. You may notice that post titles are truncated in the side bar. That's just because I happen to think it's very ugly when post titles wrap to the next line and make the list look all decroded... so I decided to do something about it =)
  8. On any page, the title of the blog is a link to the home page.

Please feel free to let me know if you would like other stuff done -- tweaks done, kinks ironed, colors changed, etc. -- If anything comes up that seems worthwhile I'll pop it in.

Also, I'll write a comment to this post to demonstrate the comment changes.

10 Comments
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  Comment by Blogger Sir Robert at 1:53 PM, June 14, 2006
It looks like I have used a couple of tags that are non-standard. Because of this, the highlighting of elements when you move your mouse over them isn't supported in all browsers. I'll fix this in the next few days (or something =) The non-colormod changes all seems to work cross-browser, though.
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  Comment by Blogger Kristi at 1:55 PM, June 14, 2006
Just wanted to say, thanks for working with me on this, SR! I really don't think I wanted a bulletin board, so I am glad for this format.

Though sadly, I don't think it will solve your RSS feed preference Dwight, right? Anyway...

I'll leave it up to everyone else now to contribute their $.02 :)
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  Comment by Blogger Jackson at 5:40 PM, June 14, 2006
I am more or less a total fan. Thanks, Sir Robert.
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  Comment by Blogger Sir Robert at 2:55 PM, June 15, 2006
So, I fixed a few more little quirks and bugs. Items now highlight properly in all browsers (maybe some exceptions for those of you using like ... lynx on a tandy with a teletype display, but plbth to you).

I also added a "SHOW ALL / HIDE ALL" set of buttons at the top of each comments section. It's not a toggle switch... clicking SHOW ALL twice won't show them and then hide them. It's two separate buttons =) Two. Buttons. =)
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  Comment by Blogger Dwight at 1:05 PM, June 16, 2006
now can you add comments to the rss feed?
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  Comment by Blogger Dwight at 3:36 PM, June 16, 2006
also, I just noticed... after the comment it says: @ whatever time the comment was posted... you might want a date or something...
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  Comment by Blogger Dwight at 7:33 AM, June 17, 2006
can you make the "recent contributions" list dynamic, so if I post a comment on the first post on the blog, it will show up at the top of the recent contributions?

Also, can you put a link at the bottom of the template that lets you read older posts?
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  Comment by Blogger Dwight at 8:09 AM, June 17, 2006
I "fixed" the date thing... I don't know if it the best, but it seemed to be the shortest that included the time... if we don't care about time we can get shorter...
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  Comment by Blogger Sir Robert at 3:24 PM, June 19, 2006
Thanks Dwight. You were right -- it's MUCH better with the date there (I didn't even think of it). I went ahead and did some formatting to make it look a little better (and some scripting to support it). Also, I removed the @ to get back some of our scarce real-estate.
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  Comment by Blogger Dwight at 6:16 PM, June 20, 2006
wait... so you replaced "@" with "at"... I think they are about the same width?
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