Christ, I’m about to go cross-eyed. I’ve probably put about 16 hours into the new site design this weekend. So far, I’m fairly pleased with it. I’ve completed enough of it to get a good feel for how it’s all going to turn out, but I’m still a ways off. I’ve pretty much completed the template, weblog, and music parts. Still to go are the gallery, feeds, and contact sections. The gallery is going to be the tough one since I’ll be writing it from scratch.
To-do:
- Fix “Gallery Quick Links” dropdown to go to that gallery directory
- Fix Gallery Stats added count to go to a list of last batch update (just like old site)
- Fix Random Image to go to full-size picture
- Pull Movies section info from the movies database (an updated version of http://movies.phragmunkee.com)
- Add content to Feeds section
- ChattaLAN feed
- my del.icio.us feed
- Need more feeds! (maybe add favorite, non-personal feeds?)
- Add content to Contact section
- AIM screen names
- MSN screen names
- Yahoo screen names
- E-mail address (scrambled, of course)
- Categorize the weblog
- Copy categories (maybe dropping a few) from the other blog
Another feature I’ve considered adding with the new gallery is a comment block. This would, of course, be moderated by me (for content). But, it should be pretty easy to make a pop-up balloon (similar to an address on Google Maps) come up over a picture (using a z-index) and “say” something. Like a comic balloon! Comments would be enabled by default and a user could turn them off by setting a cookie (via a link, easily). Even the random images could pop up with the comments. Maybe truncate a comment at like 32 characters and add an elipses (…) that links to the full-size picture with the comment underneath.
I’d also like to add a rating system to the gallery that will enable visitors to rate their favorite pictures (from 1 to 5 stars–like Amazon). Then I could add more sections to the gallery based on user ratings. I’d also like to mess around with tagging to make custom directories outside of the fixed filesystem directory structure. Oh, and slideshows! Do a slideshow of whatever tag/rating/directory you are viewing. It can be manual (clicking next/prev) or automatic (javascript sleep timers).
I need to find a place to put the quotes back in as well. I don’t know where to do that, and I’m afraid I’m running out of screen space to put another section in the “underlinks” (that’s what I call that link bar). Everything looks great with a screen width of 1280, but those poor people still stuck at 1024 (or heavens forbid, 800!), would see clutter. I don’t think it degrades very well. It might fit if I shorten the “Gallery Quick Links” to just “Gallery” or something.
Once I get some suitable content into each underlinks section, I’m going to roll the site live and then add any other features afterwards. That way I can get it live and get some feedback and squish any bugs.
I also need to work on the admin section (you people will never see it). The Serendipity stuff is already in-place (that’s how I’m writing this!). I need to copy the admin functionality of the movies site over. Then, as I start adding the ratings, comments, and tagging features to the gallery, I’ll probably add the administrative functionality in-line with the pages so I can edit as I go along. I’m not entirely sure how to handle the Feeds as of yet. I may hard-code them or I may make them database-driven. Same goes for the Contact section. Once I get those two set up, I don’t really see them changing much. I guess I’ll figure it out when I get to it. I may also tinker around with the idea of adding user logins to the site to allow people to do their own tagging in the gallery. I’m not entirely sure how many people would use this feature, so that’s a big IF. The music stuff is also pretty secure in how I’m going to keep it, so I may make that hard-coded as well. I might put an input box on the page so that a visitor can type in any Last.fm user name and pull those stats for that user. It wouldn’t be difficult, but it’s not a high priority.
Oh yeah, and I think I’ll add the cutesy little graphic link bars for Smarty, Serendipity, and AudioScrobbler/Last.fm to the left-hand column aligned to the bottom under the random image.
A couple of last things. I need to check out the emoticon graphics for the blog to make sure they are all transparent and kosher-looking on the red background. And I need to look into comment-SPAM prevention methods before any SPAMbots can get a hold of it.
Comments? Suggestions?
Must sleep…
