Just a thought. Since we have such a (wonderful) influx of oft' posting authors as of late, the rapidity of the front page scrolling down and away has become an issue to be thought about. I have an idea...
Why not have a small plain-text "sticky" post at the top with the past three days (and links to them)?
That is, like the "Leave a Comment" post, it stays up at the top, but has just quick links to the stories that've been posted in the past two or three days?
For example, right now it would be:
| 17 January 2008 | |||
| 3026 Girls 3 | Easy Bike 179 | Rules 33 | Stark State Grace |
| Thankful | TWINS 24 | TWINS 25 | Violet Ajah |
| 18 January 2008 | |||
| 3026 Girls 4 | Easy Bike 180 | Edu Hills 111 | Enterprise 4 |
| Eve of Man | Foster Daughter 2 | Foster Daughter 3 | Houston Situation |
| Price to Pay 8 | Roni Gwyn | Rules 34 | Who Was I 19 |
| 19 January 2008, Morning Update | |||
| 3026 Girls 5 | Olivia Twist 5 | Rules 35 | Price to Pay 9 |
Alphabetized by date, even :) (left to right!)
Comments
Not a bad idea, but . . .
I'm sure many of us also use the author information and keywords to decide which stories to read. Also, not having the complete story title might lead to confusing the stories by two different authors if the second author were to use the same title as an already existing story. So to include that information will make those boxes significantly bigger.
But at least you are thinking about the situation, something most of us have not done. Good show!
KJT
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"
Janis Joplin
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
A lot of work?
It sounds like it might be a lot of work for somebody,
because it might have to be done manually, which could
mean information lag.
One thing to consider is the feed.
You can get a free (even anonymous) account at www.bloglines.com,
and subscribe to this feed: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/rss.xml
The story links won't go away until you've marked them as "read"
(rhymes with "red"). And you can "pin" links so they don't go
away until you un-pin them. (Just for starters.)
Kaleigh
Interesting concept
I'd prefer to only show the latest episode/part/chapter of an ongoing work - rather than all posts. That would give a bit more room for some that may have scrolled further down.
Valid comment about other category based filtering. It's never easy to figure things ont.
One idea that came to me was a "compressed" view where only the title and author/category bar shows. Would it work? I dunno.
Compressed view
I could go for that.
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
Edeyn, Let me Get With Erin
to formulate a response to this idea. It does require coding and constant upgrades because of Drupal being open sourced. Bob would have to be in on any decision. I myself do not know the answer but It seems very reasonable if it can be reasonably done. I would like it too.
BigCloset TopShelf
Not doable at present
Such a block would have to be hand-coded and hand-updated, ten or more times per day to be accurate. A programmable version (without title shortening) that self-updates as needed can't be constructed from Drupal tools at the moment but might be possible in the future without actual coding. A hand-coded, auto-updating version is doable but isn't going to be very high on things I want to spend time on since option two, using Drupal tools to do it, will probably work with a not too distant update of Drupal, later this year.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Just would like to point out...
After Tax Seasonâ„¢, I could likely be convinced to donate time to helping out. And both of the blocks above took me a grand total of about 15 minutes -- including the time to look up what stories had been posted on what days for the past 3. I'd be willing to post a daily blog with this info and update it a few times a day for now (during Tax Seasonâ„¢) so it would be reasonably accurate. I mean three times a day would be often enough that it could serve as a general guide -- besides which, the part to be concerned about off-page scrolling is the past days. The current day would be there for people to see and nab, and the past days wouldn't change once that day was gone. I was just thinking of an easy way for folks to keep up with the now-massive scroll. Last year when I started with Sk8r Grrls, a story posted would be on the first screen or two of the first page for days before falling below. Now... well, it's a good thing to have more authors, but I personally am always scrolling to make sure I didn't miss anything. I thought this could be a good, quick solution as it would give access to stories by days instead of by recent-ness.
And adding
"Price to Pay 9" to the above took me about 45 seconds.
Do the Blog :)
I'll put it on top of the page listing for as long as someone is willing to keep it up.
Why do I feel like Tom Sawyer? :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
LOL
I'll... I'll gib youse dis apple if'n you'd let me do summa dat whitewash fer ya!
Coding versus coding
Edeyn,
I'll make an assumption here that when you say it took 15 minutes to code the table in your example that you were talking about coding in HTML. So please forgive me if I'm wrong in that assumption. This is in no way meant as a put down or anything like that.
The blog engine that runs this site is Drupal and it uses a SQL, probably MySQL, backend for the database, a PHP5 scripting engine and Apache for the web server.
To write safe code in PHP takes a good understanding of programing principles and PHP5 in particular, and an even better understanding of secure coding practices. To get that code integrated into Drupal means that you also have to understand Drupal and the way it does things along with understanding the various tables within the database and what each of the table fields does and what kind of information is stored within that table. Much of that data is encoded into a form that is not easily read by a human. Like date and time encoded as the number of seconds that has elapsed since a fixed date, of which I can't remember what that date is.
Since this is a production site any code that Erin, Bob, Sephrena, etc. would come up with would have to be thoroughly tested to make sure that, 1 it works and 2 that it doesn't introduce any security vulnerabilities that might compromise this site and each of the site visitor's PCs.
Blogs are currently one of the most used ways to compromise people's PCs, to steal information or take over a blog user's PC. Most of these exploits take advantage of poor coding in the code that runs the blog. Usually this is done by using a SQL injection attack to put unwanted code into the database and have it fed to every visitor on the site. Drupal has undergone 3 highly recommended security updates within the last few months to fix problems that allow this kind of attack to take place. The people behind Drupal work very hard to make sure that Drupal is safe and secure, but even with their extensive coding background, code reviews, beta testing etc., serious bugs still slip through. Erin and co don't have the resources to do all of these things.
Erin also pointed out that the next version of Drupal 6.x will likely have what you are looking for so the effort required to produce the required code by Erin and her admins is not likely worth it or the potential risk to the site and it's viewers PCs.
While it may be simple to write some HTML code to achieve what you have suggested, the automated coding of something like this is far more complicated.
Why not just code it by hand then? Well as recent events in both Erin's and Sephrena's lives have shown, real life has a way of crashing down on you when you least expect it. Anything that increases the workload of the wonderful people running this site, unless absolutely necessary, should be avoided.
Again Edeyn, if I'm out of line I do apologize.
Arwen
Hrm.
What I was saying was HTML, yes, but that's all that's necessary if one is willing to update -- and really, it's not the current day that needs the quicklinks, it's the prior one or two. I have been coding in everything under the sun since I was 12 years old -- 20 years. I learned UNIX before I learned DOS, and when there was a computer mishap at my college my freshman year, and we had to rely on old systems for about a month, I helped with the punch card progging.
So, while I don't know much about Drupal or PHP, if I wanted to do so... I would. I read phenomenally fast and I retain over 90% (93.7% ± 3% to be exact) of everything I read. However, I believe in the theory of Lo-Tek and the philosophy of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
So all that's needed really is a once-per day update to some HTML... which I'm willing to do, and update 3 times daily just to make it spiffy.
No offense taken, as bad coders are reaching epidemic proportions and the concern is one that I share!
"Thank yew for yer support." -- Bartles & Jaymes
j
*
Made a few changes to Edeyn's shortcut blog
I thought it looked better with a border around it so I added one. :) Also fixed a glitch in the HTML that would give some browsers fits. And changed the title and made it a Page instead of a Blog so it doesn't take up a blog spot in the list of blogs. And turned comments off but they can be turned back on if necessary. And fudged the date to keep it on top. And gave Edeyn editing privileges on Pages. I added Admin to author so people know it's official. :)
Is it too wide? There's some leeway here or go to three columns to narrow it up if the width is a problem for people.
Thanks, Edeyn. :)
HUgs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Question
Can we get an On/Off checkbox for it?
KJT
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"
Janis Joplin
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Options
Sorry. It's not a block which I would have to update so no, there's no way at the moment to give people the option to turn it off.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Curious
what HTML was changed so I don't make the same mistake in the future?
HTML
font center font --- /font /font /center
The mis-nesting makes Safari and some versions of Opera guess wrong about closing domains.
- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Yeah, well
That was just me being a sloppy wench. Heh. Thanks. I normally am careful about that, but I was speeding through it. :)
Nice.
I like it. Nice clean little table. It looks like the marquee out in front of a Cineplex ("Gosh, I never heard of
any of these movies! What time are they playing?"). Or maybe the lineup for a horse race. "And they're off! STARK STATE GRACE takes the lead, with VIOLET AJAH second by a neck, HOUSTON SITUATION is third,
followed by EVE OF MAN ..... Around the far turn, PRICE TO PAY is coming up on the outside .......
And here comes the winnnnnnnnneerrr: BEEDLEBAUM!"
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.
Good thing...
...I didn't have a mouthful of something! I thought it was spelled Beetle Bomb, though. :)
- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Love your idea
I noticed before depending on when you post a story it can either stay up top for a while or get pushed down quickly.Now with your short cut, storys will stay up top for three days and readers will have a quick way to them.Great thinking Edeyn!!! Hugs Amy