I’ve spent the day (Well, not the entire day…) getting down and dirty with the code for the site.  The main structure is all in place and theres been some work done on the colours.  It’s a bit like using a wordprocessor really, get the blocks of substance in the order you want and then worry about tarting up the fonts and colours.  It definitely was the right thing to do, starting from scratch.

You learn a whole lot more from doing.  Even though a lot of the constrution has been cutting and pasting from about a dozen differnt sources, never type it in if you can paste it from somewhere else, you need to know why you’re putting what where.  Saying that, the browser no longer detects a RSS feed from the page…

The link is still there but there must be some code missing from the page somewhere.  Examining a kosher theme to see what’s in there should bring the answers.  So the index page is on it’s way to being done, many other pages left to do, including ones with forms on, which is a whole new ball game for me.  Should be interesting.

If the site looks like a bomb’s hit it, that’s because I’ve decided to start from scratch with the theme. I’ve tried half a dozen 3 column layouts and none of them are quite what I’m looking for. Some are close, but on examining the code they look like they been put together in the most bizzare ways.

The closest one to what I’m after was the Bogart theme I started with, but that’s been released under a ‘No Derivatives’ licence. (And although the code was clean, it looked like too much work to beat it into shape.) So that’s why I’m gonna start with a clean slate.

So if things look a bit ragged round the edges for a while, you’ll have to excuse me. if you can’t see anything wrong that’s probably because I’ve toggled the theme back to something respectable…

On the plus side, I’ve discovered firebug, an insanely great Firefox extentsion that allows you to step thru the HTML and CSS and make changes on the fly. Absolutely invaluable for tweaking the theme.

And why it’s not a good idea. I’m forever changing the text size on sites to make them readable on my minuscule notebook screen. So here’s the problem, as the blockquote emerges from under the rounded corner it looks horrible. This isn’t just due to me fiddling with the CSS to add some padding to the images, it would have happened anyway. Try increasing the text size whilst looking at the previous post and see what I mean.

Here’s a another test quote

I have discovered the scale of my strength and the depth of my frailty and have been forced to accept, however reluctantly, our fragile mortality.

Joe Simpson - This Game of Ghosts

So the options are to go back to square corners, or change the blockquotes so they don’t have a solid background, that way the rounded corner square corner interface never happens. Thing is, if I alter the CSS stylesheet, it will alter all the quotes already posted, so if you’re looking at the site thinking there’s no problem with the quotes, then I’ve already changed them. It’s all getting a bit circular…

This post is also a test of the FeedBurner FeedFlare.

Having solid images threw up another wrinkle, no padding round the images which in turn was letting the text run up hard against the picture. It was a fairly easy fix in the CSS, courtesy of

a img {
border: 5px solid white;
}

I’m always a bit wary of fiddling with website templating code as I never know what I’m gonna break in the process. There are so many little problems and exceptions with CSS as far as browser compatibility goes, fixing one thing invariably seems to break something else.

Still don’t seem to be getting any advertising in the RSS feeds. This could be because advertisers need to specifically buy space in my feed. My distinctly lacking subscriber base could be putting them off. I would be happy if I could get anything other than the syndicated post to appear in the feed. I think I’ll have to go back to FeedBurner and add a test bit of FeedFlare to see if it’s working. If not, it could be to do with how Google Reader renders the feeds, although that’s unlikely as I’ve seen ads and other clickable links in RSS feeds.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, when I dropped that simple little tag in I didn’t realise the ramifications.

On the plus side, it forces people to the website, which increases the chance of them clicking on the revenue generating links displayed there.

On the down side, if you come to the site directly, rather than thru a feed, it means you have an extra click to read the article. This would annoy me in the long run. If you’re gonna post articles for people to read, then don’t make it harder than it has to be. Once they’ve followed a link to the site don’t make them do more clicks just to read the article. If there were some clever way to convert the <more> tag into a bit of hide and reveal css code, that would be a much nicer solution.

So say goodbye to the <more> tag, you’re probably not going to see it round here again.

Unless I change my mind again.