It was always a little kludgy, but it worked…
3 minute read
May 25, 2010, 9:26 PM
Yeah, I’m almost to the point in my redesign where it’s time to design the Journal section. Right now, before even one line of code has been written for it, it makes me nervous. See, I am worried about how many Journal entries will break. After all, I code Journal entries on the fly, and do whatever comes naturally to me. And full CSS layouts are not something I’m accustomed to. So it makes me a little nervous.
But I’m almost there. I’ve done the redesign in this order: the basic page templates, Major Areas, Archives, Odds and Ends, Photography, and most of Life and Times (still working on that last one). That leaves the Journal and then the unnamed “center section” still to do. It’s okay, though. It’s coming along quite well, and with the photo sets mostly done, that’s one less thing I have to worry about.
However, it’s going to be really weird to have done the Journal correctly for a change. Right now, it’s a bit kludgy in places. I cut a lot of corners on the current design, which dates from 2007, to make it look right regardless of whether it was also done correctly. If you look at my code for the Journal, there are a bunch of little invisible graphics that are there just to get the spacing correct. After all, I kind of did the 2007 redesign under a bit of duress. The site had gone down, and I was determined to convert it from ASP to PHP and get it back up as quickly as possible, and the hell with doing it the right way. According to my update log, the Journal was the first item to be restored. Thus not only was I racing to get it back up and running, but I was also perhaps doing most of the learning on a new HTML editor and a new platform on that section. So a few kludges were inevitable, I suppose.
Now, I can take my time and do things correctly. No kludges here. Also, don’t expect a release right away after I finish the design. Once I finish, I’m going to sit on it for a bit while I finish a few photo sets, in order to have some new pages on launch. Look for some new sets in Photography and Life and Times when it’s all done.
Now that I’m on the last section, I can also say that a few things are getting revised. Fire Alarm Collection will be more graphical, for one. Then the Vintage Schumin Web page has been completely rewritten. Then on a few protest photo sets from 2004 and 2005, I will finally be dropping the “protest literature” pages. You may recall that at the time, I collected any flyers or leaflets that were offered to me, scanned them in, and presented them all. A few factors led to these pages’ demise. First of all, I stopped the practice in 2006, and completed a number of other photo sets without the literature pages. Additionally, they always seemed to be a strange add-on compared to the rest of the sets that they were in. And lastly, I reconsidered whether I wanted to give many of these groups a soapbox on Schumin Web, since I did not endorse these various organizations, and had never even heard of many of them aside from a representative from their group handing me literature. So they’re gone.
And now, time to design a more functional Journal. It’s going to look very similar in the end, but it’s going to be a lot better in the design department. And I’m finally going to figure out how to integrate that bloody Twitter feed…
Web site: How to redesign a website
Song: "Hey! It's a Happy Day!" from A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant
Quote: So let's get busy...
Categories: Schumin Web meta