Our Site

Flintlock said:

I'm not sure what we decided on regarding the bold in the menu, but I don't think it's necessary. If we were actually on a page called "content", it might make sense, but we're just on the index page.

Click to expand...

Oh wait. That's because "Content" links to fhtagn.thelifestream.net - it's something old from when Shademp and I were testing the design of the top menu some time ago. Simply because a lot of the pages that exists in the database on thelifestream.net, doesn't exist on fhtagn.

I added a link to "About", it now links to the generic archives page, you can see how it looks now. I also changed the link on Content so it is no longer bolded when you are on the front page. I think giving some sort of indication as to "where you are" in the menu hierarchy is nice, whether it be the top category or the actual subcategory you are on, like if you click on About > Write for the Lifestream, "About" is now bolded. We could do something else too, like putting a little > or a lifestream ball or something in front of the subcategory you are on.

There are also the occasional link to pages on thelifestream.net, and not fhtagn.thelifestream.net, just be aware of that.

Okay so I'm continuing my "20 minutes a day TLS work". I didn't do anything Tuesday or Wednesday because Monday I was going to do 30 minutes and ended up doing 3 hours.

Anyway I've continued to update this post. Basically the top menu is now done, in a new and better version that works a little bit better in IE. Opera i have given up on () but it works 100% in the two main browsers that most of our visitors are using: Firefox and Chrome.

I have also fixed the main issues with widths and placements. The problem is that with every new major design update (Twenty Eleven --> Twenty Twelve) Wordpress will change names of CSS elements, rebrand them (id --> class, div --> section) which means they have to be manually edited in the .php files. Now this isn't a hard job really, it just takes a lot of fiddling and time. An example is in category.php, which decides what all category pages (like if you click on the category "Weekly Roundups") should look like. In Twenty Eleven the headers was:


In Twenty Twelve it has been changed to:


Which is minimum amount to change, because you can simply replace the names. The problem happens when/if we've customized page-header and page-title in the CSS file - it now has to be updated according to make sense for archive-header and archive-title. Then why change them at all, you ask - well, the problem will only be delayed when say Twenty Thirteen is launched. While these two tags have stayed header and h1, there are other places where the HTML has changed to newer and more correct versions (HTML5) - like div being replaced with header, section, article etc. If Twenty Thirteen is released with even newer CSS (like CSS3 - from what I can see WP has stayed cleared on going all in on CSS3) that only goes with the HTML5 tags, we will simply have a lot more to clean up when that time comes.

tl;dr, progress is steady but I will get there. A good thing is that after doing 2 years of college and working for a month I'm much faster, more accurate and I figure out where the problems lie more efficiently, and to my surprise I now ALWAYS figure out stuff, whereas before I was more likely to throw my hands up and not understand a thing. The only thing I haven't been able to solve is why I'm having problems with that Ridley font, but that might be a problem with browsers or the font itself. And I did find a workaround, which while is ugly, works fine.

Doing 20 minutes a day is a lot more efficient and rewarding than 20 hours in one weekend. In general I think Wordpress, as a free, open source package, is very tight and well developed. It is still PHP with all its flaws, but I like how they haven't gone all overboard with the new version, but how they're rather slowly introducing new HTML semantics. Since I do both front end and back end work at work, it's a good thing to keep up my front end knowledge without going completely -moz-all-the-things. I'll never be a CSS designer but I like building it in a smart way, and WP built theirs pretty good.

I just had a look back at the most recent front page draft I posted (here it is again), and it got me thinking, is there anything I can do to help us get closer to that? I feel like I haven't really done anything on the project in a couple of months, but I'm not really sure if that's because there's nothing I can do, or if there's something I should have been doing but haven't Fangu, Lex?

Fangu is streaming at the moment and I've just relayed this to her, she's said that there's nothing you can really do at the moment but she might ask you to take a look at the test server for feedback re: design when the time comes .

So no, there's not much you can do about the front page. Do you have any suggestions for site content?

I'm still waiting to hear back from XComp about the translations we're missing and I'd also like to do something about all those fanart contests we've been having. Then of course there's the completion of the Franchise Guide section which I've barely made a dent in. I'm going to try to at least designate certain tasks to people over the coming weeks.

FUCK

NO


SHOOT ME ALREADY




http://twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com/

Edit:

The 2013 theme for WordPress takes us back to the blog, featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way. Design details abound, starting with a vibrant color scheme and matching header images, beautiful typography and icons, and a flexible layout that looks great on any device, big or small.

Click to expand...

Fuck this and stick with Twelve? y/y?

If the 2013 theme will create problems with the present use of Pages, then we should stick to 2012. Though I honestly have no idea what the implied problem with the 2013 theme is.

The outburst came from now having spent time adapting the files on the test server (fhtagn) to Twelve. I just upgraded fhtagn to version 3.6, and there was an ad for Twenty Thirteen. Apparently it launched August 1st. I have to admit I never saw a connection between the version name and the year - ie Twelve being 2012, etc. I think it's silly to being hell bent on releasing a new version every year, but whatever.

The other WTF came from the fact that WP seems to be going in the direction of "hey! let's get back to blogs!", when everyone suspected they were going in the CMS direction, and that's what a lot of people (us including) has been using WP for. (As in not using it directly as a blog, but instead a web info page/ news page/ whatever else you might need a logging in- and admin panel/ publishing system for.)

The problem is only how large every web site owner makes it. We could probably still have been running on version Nine or Ten or whatever they were called before that - the problem is the plugins, which is often made for the current version. Meaning that if someone makes a plugin for Thirteen that we OMG MUST HAVE we're gonna run into problems if we're still on Twelve.

Another thing is that as web development moves on, and new browser versions are released, code and frameworks go extinct and are deprecated. Now I don't think Eleven is in danger of being affected by this already, but it could happen.

From what I can see Thirteen still uses the Post/Page logic, and I don't think that's going to dissappear for some time since a lot of WP's logic is built on that... logic. (I can't write today)

Anyway this isn't BAD, I just had an GOD ISN'T IT THYPICAL reaction. tbh I would think there were bigger changes from Eleven to Twelve than from Twelve to Thirteen anyway, since there were a lot of HTML5/CSS3 stuff happening in the Web World around the time Twelve was developed.

I'm gonna continue adapting fhtagn to Twelve. I'm already halfway done anyway, and everything seems to be stable. Then I'll download Thirteen, have a look at it and see if they've made any major changes to it. But I'm figuring that is gonna be sometimes much later this fall, as Twelve is gonna be a proper and stable version for some years to come anyway.

Attention Lex, Flint, Shad, Tres, Ryu, anyone, please read this? (From "Edit 3".) I guess this one is for Lex and Flint most of all.

I don't mind either way. There are certainly times that I thought a standalone excerpt would be easier, but I've not found it difficult to get the first 20 words of actual articles to fit either.

There will be a standalone for the previews on the front page, I don't think we can solve it another way with how the social media plugin is set up - and I think that's fine. It's just an extra text field where you fill in a couple of sentences.

The alternative is to just put it in first in your article, like it is done today (like in the roundups, see text in bold). But we can output it automatically too. I don't know if it's unnatural to have a front page preview as the intro to an article - I can imagine those two things are a bit different. I'll start by not outputting it at first, and then change it later if there's a desire to have it output. I'll wait for more input too, of course.

OK so ideally the excerpt wouldn't display on the post itself, but I do think it'd be neat to be able to set one and write a small desrciption of the post as well as what it currently does if we choose not to do that, i.e. just fetching a bit of the post

That's my opinion anyway, but to be honest it's not an essential thing to change and we do fine the way it is now, so don't go to super-great lengths unless it's not too annoying

Can we try to make sure our titles aren't longer than two lines in length on the front page? I took the liberty of shortening Ryu's most recent post but even with 3 it looks a bit broken, probably best to shorten it even further.

Since I fail at life I forgot about this week's roundup so it's 4 days late. Oops! But when it's posted I'll fix the title again if it makes the "other articles" part look bad.

I took the freedom of editing the Dirge of Cerberus content page and added links to high quality uploads of the Japanese FMVs (under "GAME SCRIPT & CUTSCENES"). I was just blown away by the quality so I had to create these links.

I've noticed we don't appear in Google news searches - if we did I think we'd get a lot more traffic on what we post on the front page.

I think the site needs to be submitted for inclusion at this link before it shows up. This isn't something I want to do without speaking to Yop first of course. There are guidelines to follow beforehand but all of our articles adhere to those guidelines so I don't think it'd be a problem (with google).

I'd definitely wait for Yop on this one, bc of caching, google plugins and stuff.

I'm going to take this moment to point out that I haven't forgotten about what I laid out in the opening post of this thread, and it will get done at some point. Moving swiftly on...

Avec's been doing a lot of site work, so her forum name was changed to reflect this a couple of weeks ago. She's now officially a site contributor.

Also, I still need to ask Yop about what I said in the previous post. It would definitely increase our hits and such.

Could be, I can look into it.

Just wondering if anyone was planning to post anything in the next day or so. If all goes as I've planned, I'll be publishing the new LTD article sometime in the next 12 hours. When I got delayed in finishing it toward the first half of this month, I somewhat deliberately shot for a Halloween release date thereafter.

I'm planning to make the wording of the news post timely/related to the occasion.

I'm shocked and delighted by how quickly this came together Tres. Nothing is planned. All mods on standby for the inevitable and horrific revival of the LTD thread .

YOU WILL DOOM US ALL!!!



again

And the un-dead thread will walk the earth again...

at least it'll be good entertainment!

How fitting for a zombie topic to rise in Halloween times.

Was really sleepy when I got home, so wasn't able to finish last night, but working on it now.

And it's done! FINALLY!

I've also added the entry to our Reviews & Analysis page and made a new LTD thread.

Excellent work Tres.

I said this in the other thread but images on the front page need to be in a 2:1 aspect ratio. I'm not sure whether you want to change the image or add borders to it, but it's up to you hot to go about it

Also, it might be a good idea to move the stuff in this thread that's not actually about roundups into the "our site" thread where it belongs. What does everyone else think?