(no subject)

[rusty_halo]

Instead of a New Year's resolution, I made a website to-do list. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

I have no clue if I'll ever find the time to do any of these things, but they're all ideas that I would like to incorporate into my site.

Feedback would be useful--something like "Yes! Do that!" or "No! That's a waste of time!" or "That would be nice, but why not do [some cool idea that I haven't thought of]."

-Y'know how people are often making requests like "Can someone recommend Christmas fic?" or "Can someone recommend Fanged Four fic?", stuff like that? My site covers a lot of ways to search, but that's not one of them. So I'd like to have a new category, something like "Fiction by Theme." Possible topics would be Humor, various holidays (Christmas, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, etc.), Fanged Four, etc. Whatever there seems to be a demand for, to make such types of stories easier to find. (I don't want to do "Fiction by Genre," because I'd find it impossible to classify every story into one or two genres, but "Fiction by Theme (or whatever)" seems possible.)

-List of beta readers--people can submit their names, experience, what they're good at reading for, what they'd prefer to (and not to) read, that kind of thing.

-New banner (same basic design, but different pictures)

-Updated code (combining repetitive elements, refining, etc.)

-Updated database structure (proper names for all tables)

-Move all design aspects to CSS

-Convert review system to use a database instead of flat files

-Updated search engine (to make sure it includes all stories)

-A new email program with which to send the daily email updates. The current one is kind of half-assed; overzealous spam-protectors often block emails to legitimate subscribers, and the increasing number of addresses on the list is starting to overload the weak little program.

-Author biographies or author Q&A's on author pages (optional for authors; might provide insight to readers)

-Update the links pages--get rid of dead links, add some new links

-Output all email addresses in unicode format to prevent spambots from harvesting addresses

Comments

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot to add: CSS doesn't necessarily separate design and content. When used poorly, it can make the two even more interwoven and make code even messier. (When more recent versions of MS Word generate CSS, the result is beyond horrifying; it's a really nasty mutation of what CSS is supposed to be, used for all the wrong purposes). But CSS has the potential to be much neater than old-fashioned formatting. (If you look at Peasant's code, for example, she uses CSS really well.)

[witling.livejournal.com]

Heee! She'll be so pleased to know you think so. She's such a little codemonkey.

And yeah, I occasionally teach a CSS class. I just don't use it. Because I'm lazy and lame and all I ever do anymore is play on LJ.

Play, play, play. La!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

I occasionally teach a CSS class

LOL, but you leave under-the-hood stuff to other people? Now I feel like an idiot. Sorry for getting all lectury; you know what I mean already.

But there are still plenty of people out there who don't use CSS at all. I wonder what the statistics are--I'd guess that the majority of websites still don't use it extensively.

[witling.livejournal.com]

No, no! The lecturey stuff is good! And I need to be smacked around a little for not using it myself anymore--the only web stuff I do these days is for work, and I just use Dreamweaver and the in-house CSS and basically sleep at the wheel. It's bad. My web skills are getting a big ass. They need to be taken out and walked around the lake a little bit.

And yeah, it's funny, I don't think a lot of sites do use CSS yet, which is weird when you consider how cool a concept it is. It's very hard to explain to brand-new web publishers (who are the folks I teach) why they should separate form from content in the first place. They want to use and and and all that stuff, because it's fun! Funny fun fun! And I don't blame them. I agree, it's fun, and it's instant gratification, and centering stuff using CSS is a huge pain in the ass. But still. Overall, it's good.

So anyway, we're trying to breed CSS-users here. Or at least, CSS-understanders. It's going...well, uh, since I'm the teacher and I don't use or understand them all that well...I'd say, fair to middling.

Yeah.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Man, you sound just like my coworker and I when we decided that we were officially more technically competent than our boss. We basically ordered him to stop using Dreamweaver because he kept going in to update little things on our sites and messing up all the code by opening and saving files in DreamWeaver. That was a good battle to win, though; our sites are so infinitely better now that we're using CSS and pretty much hand-coding everything. It opens up so many possibilities.

It is *really* hard to explain it to someone who is used to old style HTML, though. CSS is not really intuitive; it's easier in the short-term to just put the formatting right in there. It took me a while to understand, too: you have to look at the long-term benefits, which greatly exceed the short-term convenience.

(Oh, um, and LJ automatically tries to use HTML brackets; you have to encode them to get them to show up. Like, I used & l t ; and & g t ; --minus the spaces--to make < and >.)

[witling.livejournal.com]

Heeeeeee! I'm an idiot today. And also sort of working on automatic pilot. Sorry for making your eyes bleed like that.

And, ahem, yes. CSS good.