Ch-ch-ch-changes

Those of you who actually return to my site on a semi regular basis are probably scratching your heads at all the changes. I'm putting up videos, I'm putting up cartoons, I'm putting ads in the right column, and thinking "What's with the "new" section and why are stories showing up on the index?" You're probably questioning what ELSE is going to change. Well, considering I'm lazy, the answer is: not much more for the next few months.

Top Story Preview

Lets start with the obvious big change. You're probably reading part of this on the "What's New" page. It seemed pretty self evident to me that the newest page should show up on the "What's New" page. Of course I still want to show a list of new stories on the page too.

The issue of what to show on the page was a dilema, in that I wanted both the newest story and the list on the page. The solution was to figure out how to put PART of the newest story on the page.

I've been using PHP and a templating scheme I came up with over 6 years ago to present pages on this site. It's what I consider to be a major evolution in website presentation. The quick version: I have content in the main page seperated into a stack of variables. the Main page calls the master template, which takes the variables and puts them into an html framework. The look and feel of the page is controlled by CSS for display and printing.

Because of my system, I am able to extract the first link in the main page, (top story) pull a copy of it into memory, edit it for length, and insert the results into the main page. Voila, you get a preview of the top story (sometimes the whole thing) at the top of the What's new page. In fact, I liked it so much I let it replicate to the Older stories indexes.

Little Tweaks

For the longest time, I assumed people would click on my logo to get back to the What's New Index. Well, that wasn't the case, so I added a "New" link to the top nav.

I've been tinkering with the idea that people don't like to tackle reading gigantic stories on websites. In fact I'm pretty sure that the casual reader gets turned off when they see a gigantic story shoved in their face, so I've been breaking my stories into pages that make them eaiser on the eyes. A side effect of this is that the really long list of stories in the right nav had to be shortened.

It's really not that NEW of a feature, but I got the section pages to display only stories in their immediate section and their parent section. What's really new is that I changed the ALL stories list into a section based css popup list. The All Stories popup list now also shows on all the "Not So New" stories archive.