Seasonal Plume

Ah, finally it’s done. Just a few days shy of WordPress 2.3, but it’s running on the 2.3 release candidate as I figure it would be easier and faster to upgrade to the stable releases later on, than to keep using 2.2 for the new layout. So here it is, a cleaner, less cluttered, and hopefully faster-loading Seasonal Plume.

I still really like the old layout, but I was starting to look for something easier on the eyes, where the attention is more on what’s written than on how the website looks like (though I’ve had quite a few good reviews of it!). There are a lot of other things I took into consideration with the redesign, but the technical stuff will be food for discussion either at my portfolio or my scripts blog.

What’s “special” about this layout, though, was that everything lines up! It took me a while to get every single element to line up correctly. ;) Also, I took careful consideration of my library section, so that the books are more organized and contain useful information other than just pretty covers. I will be re-tagging all the entries–a side effect of the new tagging features for WP2.3, but as my tags are all over the place, I think that’s fine.

If anything breaks, or if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me know! I would love to hear them, especially if my blog breaks ;)

Yes, this is another one of my many revamps. ;) The design study/comp has been done since two weeks ago, but due to work plus the Philippine Blog Awards, I haven’t been able to upload it until now. I feel this is better because frankly, I feel that it’s more conducive to writing—that I feel like the layout itself is something I’d enjoy writing on. A kind of environment to surround myself in; in addition to an actual, real-life environment, the website itself then provides an atmosphere that inspires writing.

Now, while the markup uses very few images (you can take off the stylesheet and all you’ll see are text, save for the actual image content) the actual design does use images rather extensively. There’s around 500kb worth of images, broken down into 25 files, and almost all of them are used as backgrounds. Yes, that header image is a background. If you don’t see the header image, then that’s a problem. :p I’ve used a preloading script of sorts, but it’s possible that it’s not working as optimally as possible—feel free to holler if you keep losing the header image.

Allow me to quickly run though the structural changes:

• All completely-website-related posts are now contained as an “aside”, like the snippets category. Which means, the blog posts/articles themselves will not be interrupted if I feel like rambling about website changes! (Well, except if you’re reading through the RSS feed.)
• You should get a quick glimpse at all the recent posts if you click on the “table of contents” link at the top of the page; there’s also the search form. Clicking on the “table of contents” link will close it.
• Recent comments are featured below along with excerpts from most recent interesting posts such as a literary snippet, most recent website update, and a review (not yet shown on the front page).
• Posts from my other blogs are also given a link shown below, in case something catches your eye.
• The footer contains much more information: a contact form, Flickr images, my recent readers, last status and tracks, as well as links and information.
• The layout is optimized for 1024x screen resolutions unlike my usual minimum requirement of 800x. Of course, it will still be viewable without horizontal scrollbars in 800x, and there shouldn’t be a big loss of style; it’s just that it looks better in 1024x and upwards. Naturally, it’s also cross-browser compatible.

As mentioned, if you see anything wrong, go ahead and comment. If you see another website post in the front page that’s not in the side column below, it’s probably because it’s something as “important” as this revamp. :p (Though I know importance is subjective, hee.)

Much love to Lynn for helping me troubleshoot the layout a bit. ♥

Yay for website revamps! Finally, the website’s WordPress installation is all upgraded, and I’ve finally done a new theme for it. Just in time — I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to update the layout before NaNoWriMo hits. I’ve been working almost all day on getting the theme up, as I only came up with the layout idea mid-morning. Battling WordPress and my plugins were also quite a challenge, but they’re all good now!

(I still have to reorganize my categories and tags — seriously, the way I use both? It’s pretty much haphazard, and it’s a mess.)

Also, in prep for NaNo, I’ve installed a word count meter right here — you can see it at the bottom of the page. I reallyreally hope I’d be able to keep writing once the second week hits. I wouldn’t be surprised if I slack off, really, but I’m hoping for the best. Tomorrow I will probably either work on a few more websites, or do more Nano-thinking.

I should write some more, but I’m bushed.

I was busy on two things since last night, all the way until this morning:

• reorganizing my messy and long-untouched Writing folder, and
• installing and customizing WordPress on this domain!

I feel pretty good about how both turned out, too.

The Revamp

I’d been meaning to set up a blog here for some time already, but just couldn’t really decide on what tool to use, or even if I should go ahead with it. For one thing, I haven’t “blogged” in a long time — for me, the difference between “journaling” and “blogging” is significant enough. I’ve been doing more “bloggish” entries for a while, but… well, yeah. Plus I liked my livejournal. Well, most of the time.

However, recently I’ve had one of my many sporadic (seasonal?) compulsions to go back to my writing. I’ve long meant for Seasonal Plume to be my “literary” domain (since the domain name itself is literary in nature) and have been fashioning it as such for quite a while now, but it’s never really been concrete, I suppose. But now I realized this is a good way to actually immerse myself again into the world of (fiction) writing, which I all but left once I went into college.

This is my first time using an actual blogging tool, and I’m still learning my way around WordPress, so pardon any eventual mess you might come across (please tell me about it, though!). It’s not yet fully fleshed out as well — nothing yet by way of domain/site information, and links, and various other sundry stuff. I suppose that happens when you focus too much on, er, aesthetics—which I certainly ended up focusing on, though the results aren’t exactly the way I’d like them to be. But, omgAJAX! This is sooo shiny, and I can feel AJAX will be competing with my writing for my attention, as I’ve always wanted to learn but couldn’t start; but the spiffiness is fabulous. The AJAXy stuff you see here is due mostly to script.aculo.us and 5ThirtyOne (his WordPress Foliage Mod was the base of this layout!).

A question: what plugins should I get? Especially for spam protection? I love spam (the food kind) but hate spam (the mail kind). But there are too many spam plugins for my brain to take in with only two hours’ sleep without overloading.

Writing Folder Reorganization

This was what I was doing before I got it into my head to get obsessed with putting up my site as a WordPress blog in less than a day. :P I haven’t touched any of those files in a long time! I’m done, but I think I need to read or scan them and check if I’ve placed them into correct folders. I moved the Writing folder into my root, and within in I have four more folders: Scraps, In Progress, Finished, and Published.

The one with the least content is Published, obviously—but I placed in it the stuff I once submitted to (the now gone) Aming Katha and BNext. I think I might have to move the articles I’ve written for the school newspaper during high school there, too. The one with the most—it’s a toss-up between Scraps and In Progress. There were a lot of short stories that I dumped into the Scraps folder, as they’re too maudlin to be placed anywhere else! I unearthed a lot of poetry, as well, most of them rather “off”.

The hardest ones to categories were the ones between “In Progress” and “Finished”. Take, for example, Chimerage, which I wrote in high school. It should actually be under “Published”, but since publishing it in the school newspaper, it’s gone through yet another rewriting. I have another “version” of the story which I had then marked as “Finished”, but looking back at it, I feel like rewriting it again. Although I think it’s coming close to the point that I have to just let it go, or change it a lot from how it was when it was published in the MHCS Beat. The latter option, I’m not too keen on; I feel like I should just move on and stop obsessing about the childhood story. Haha!

In any case, I found a lot of material, but most of them are scattered all over the place. I feel quite overwhelmed already, just thinking of trying to organize them all into some sembrance of order. Or just delete the bulk—a lot of them are quite, quite embarrassing!