The last final has been turned in, so my semester is officially over. I think the big highlight of the day (academically, anyway) was getting stopped in the stairwell by my Flight and Orbital Mechanics instructor, who happily informed me that I had the highest score in the class on our final. I'm pretty floored by that, actually, because I spent more time finishing up projects and homework than studying for that final in the 36 hours leading up to the final.
The end of classes and finals, of course, means that I now have some time to do things that
I want to do, and, chief among those things, is spend some quality time on the code behind
S-S.net and this blog. I've been fooling around with designs for both for months now, and I may actually have a chance to implement them over break.
Silver-Starlight.Net
Appallingly, I haven't touched the design on
S-S.net since it was uploaded in May 2004. While it doesn't actually
look bad, it's pretty hideous code-wise. The header and left sidebar are handled entirely using JavaScript, which is something of a no-no and hasn't exactly lent itself to updating the content, as evidenced by the fact that I never have. A serious overhaul is, therefore, long overdue. First on the list: a liberal application of PHP and CSS whitewashing. Proud as I am of my
Photoshop planets, it's time to give them a rest. My new design is primarily whitespace, which lets me play with having a lot more color and variety in the text.
Contentwise, I'm throwing out the completely useless "fandom" and "quizzes" sections because, really, who cares? My
gallery is the replacement for the old
artifacts page, and some
del.icio.us-ness will take care of that links section, methinks. The only bit of the old site that's really surviving seems to be the writing section, which I'm looking at revamping, actually. I'm rather fond of some of the choices that were made on
{whisperback}, so I've decided to present some of my writing similarly. Rather than posting story excerpts in static HTML or PHP pages, though, I've decided to post the excerpts here in the blog with links to and from a writing index on the site. This not only gives me easier control over editing (and provides potential password security for my work), but it makes it easier for me to get feedback on my writing. So don't be surprised to see excerpts of stories appearing here soon.
In addition to revamping the writing section of the site, I'm adding a section dedicated to music. The
new tag cloud demonstrates how frequently I talk about music in some form or another, so it seems appropriate to have a place to showcase my interest.
In terms of what's actually been
done on all of this... the coding for the design is 95% complete, and I have content ready for the music section and part of the writing section. Tonight I finally did something I've been hoping to do for a long time, namely
integrate the gallery with the site design. (Yes, clicking that link will give you an idea of what the new design looks like!) I have to say that the HTML back-end for
Coppermine is pretty hideous by my standards, so I contented myself with bastardizing their "classic" template just enough to have it fit into my design and look semi-decent. I may go back in a tweak some of the colors and fonts later, but I don't expect it to change too much from its current form simply because I don't like digging through nested HTML tables. CSS positioning has spoiled me like that.
The Blog
Now that I've given the impression that a new S-S.net is round-the-corner achievable, where does that leave the blog? Well, I've had a new visual design for the blog worked out for awhile now, but, in my typical fashion, I'm now starting to have some second thoughts on it. I think perhaps a new color scheme on what I've already built might be in order. We'll have to wait and see. Since the release of
WordPress 2.0 and
K2 Version One are both forthcoming, I have curtailed my WordPress-porting activities for the moment because I'm interested in taking full advantage of what I like about both of these once they come out. I may or may not end up using K2 as the base for my new design. We'll just have to see what the new version brings. It seems likely to me that I may borrow parts of it, if nothing else.
In case you hadn't guessed, I'm planning more than just a new appearance for the blog. I'm hoping to end up with a product that is both easier for me to use and maintain and easier for visitors to navigate. I've used
LiveJournal in the past, and that, if nothing else, has taught me that chronological archives are virtually useless, even for the author. Most of the time, when I'm searching someone's journal for something, it's content-related rather than date-related. To that end, I'm moving toward
tagging as a way of maintaining some order. Because tags allow greater control than categories, this should let me track topics more easily, and it should provide visitors to the site with a place to start in the archives. (Incidentally, the archive potential of
Ultimate-Tag-Warrior's "Related Tags" and "Related Posts" functions are thrilling me.)
What's happening to the categories then? Well, I'm not getting rid of them. Instead of differentiating posts by topic, though, the categories will be differentiating them more by size.
Asides will now be for shorter entries--especially those of the "Hey, look at this" variety--while
Journal contains the more substantial entries. And, for those posts that stand out above others for one reason or another, we have a third category:
Memorable. Yesterday's achievement was to get all of my entries properly tagged and categorized according to this new system. I'm rather pleased with the result.
I realize that what I'm doing is
far from unique, but I feel, nevertheless, that the changes reflect the sort of site I would like this to be, and, as I've learned with every incarnation of a site I've had so far, the more I like a site--including visual design and backend--the more I use/update/etc. said site. In the end, the busy-ness of this semester has left me with quite a few regrets, and high among those is my lack of blogging. It's not so much that I'm unhappy when I'm not blogging as it is that I feel a definite absence of records. Even though a lot of the day-to-day stuff I talked about in my LJ was pointless, recording most everything had the advantage of virtually guaranteeing that I preserved things that I will like to go back and refer to later. I have the distinct feeling that, in the future, I'm going to regret not having preserved more of this semester. Maybe it's bit foolish or naive on my part, but I'm hoping that some of what I do with this new design will help alleviate this problem in the future.
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