Eagle's Path: New journal formatting (2005-06-23)

I haven't written much lately in part because I've been very busy at the conference in Pittsburgh (giving two talks and doing lots of networking, as well as a great dinner with some SF/Usenet folks from the area last night), and in part because the network here hasn't been great. It's particularly bad in the hotel.

It wasn't too bad during the conference today, though, and there were a few things I didn't care much about, so I finally got around to redoing the templates for my journal to make them look a little bit better. I may well have broken IE or Opera again (let me know if so), but it looks quite a bit nicer on Firefox. (And honors default font styles, which has been bugging me for a while.)

This isn't the long-awaited move to WordPress, which I'm still planning on doing, unless some other free blog software ends up looking like it has a better maintenance policy and can still deal with comment spam. I should probably take a long look at Blosxom before picking something.

I can confirm that it seems to work well on Opera, at least in version 7.5. The text on the individual message pages does have a sense of being excessively wide to me, but I suppose that's what I get for having a 1100-odd-pixel-wide browser window.

I'll be interested to see what you end up with as a choice for blog software; I'm thinking of possibly starting a non-Livejournal one in the nearish future.

Posted by Brooks Moses at 2005-06-23 15:22

Nice.

Most of the people setting up weblogs these days that i see are using or moving to WordPress, for what it's worth.

Posted by rone at 2005-06-23 15:45

what brooks said (opera 8.0 here).

Posted by piranha at 2005-06-23 18:07

I'm unhappy with MT because of the licensing, so I'll definitely be moving to something, and will post when I figure out what. Whatever it is, it will be something already packaged for Debian, since I don't feel like installing my own stuff.

There's something weird with the current layout that causes the posts on the main page to end up flush against the top of the page while the sidebar is still down a little bit in Firefox -- except that as soon as I reload the page, it goes away. Since reload causes it to change, I'm pretty sure that it's a bug in Firefox and am currently just not going to worry about it.

This is a little bit closer to the layout that I use for the rest of my pages, although I couldn't find a way to make it really identical. Brooks, I'm thinking about putting the sidebar on all of the pages, including the individual entries, which would fix that problem. I think it's rather too wide too right now.

Posted by eagle at 2005-06-23 19:29

Looks fine on Safari (1.3) as well. No trouble with alignment on the main page.

Posted by Jeff Vinocur at 2005-06-24 11:50

Putting the sidebar on the individual-entry pages would do another (minor) useful thing for me, too -- since I read this through Livejournal's RSS feed, what often happens is that when you post a message, it reminds me to be curious if there are any new comments on any of your older messages, and so I click on the message link and then on the "Main Page" link to get to a list of new comments. Having the list of new comments on page for the individual entry would save me one of those clicks.

Posted by Brooks Moses at 2005-07-01 21:39

I did realize one problem with this, which is that MT doesn't regenerate the individual entry pages when I make new entries, so the sidebar information would have to be very stripped down or wouldn't be accurate. Unless I turn on generation of all the pages on the fly... hm.

Maybe I should actually wait until I get WordPress working to try to solve that problem. I think I'll be able to use the same formatting for it (I'd better be able to!), and I think it's more dynamic about what it generates.

Posted by eagle at 2005-07-01 21:55