3 Changes
Comments: 7
Made a few changes recently based on other people’s brilliant ideas.
Category links
You can now click on an entry’s category tag/s to go to particular category archive pages. I saw this idea credited to Kurt (but can’t recall the site where I read it). A why-didn’t-I-think-of-it change.
Related Entries
On the individual story pages I’m trying out Adam Kalsey’s related entries which uses Brad Choate’s MT SQL plug-in. The thinking behind this is brilliant and I’m mighty curious to see how entries here respond to it.
Entifier for Comments Form
I folded Steve Minutillo’s character entifier bookmarklet into the comment form, so if you copy and paste text containing curly quotes, proper apostrophes, or other high-ASCII characters, you can just click a button to convert characters to HTML entities. Goes great with SmartyPants.
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Posted to MetaStuff • 2003.05.31 (Sat) • 22:22
Comments
Posted by Khalid 2003.05.31, 23:50
Nice refinements. The "Related Entries" feature is kinda exciting.
One more thing, while you're nit-picking. You might want to rename the "Recent Posts" pop-up to "Preceding Posts". When you're reading an old entry, the pop doesn't show you recent posts, but rather posts that are immediately prior to the one currently being viewed. Perhaps this is because older pages are not rebuilt each time you post.
Posted by jh 2003.06.01, 11:49
Khalid —
> You might want to rename the "Recent Posts" pop-up
> to "Preceding Posts"I think you're right. I let "recent" stand in for "contemporary" but if the page gets rebuilt, the temporal meaning changes back to "recent to now" as the relationship to the story's date of posting evaporates. Can't have it both ways. It's not working, is it.
Might be best just to remove the pull-down altogether at the individual story level. The 'next and previous story' links at the top of the page provide a thin but adequate pipeline into the contemporary-with-this-story layer, and then there's always the chronological archive.
Then there's the question of accessing the latest (chronologically now) stories from individual story pages, a 'latest stories on the main page' list, and whether this is useful (you wouldn't have to click "Home" first — but the thought occurs that this may provide a useful mental trigger that helps activate that chronology shift awareness we're talking about above).
Posted by Khalid 2003.06.01, 20:25
You could turn the two top-of-page 'next and previous story' links into two pop-up menus that show the next five and previous five contemporary links. That would deepen the pipeline and keep related widgets together spatially, but aesthetically it might look a little heavy on browsers where we can't style the menus. Given the style of your weblog (chronology isn't that important; one post doesn't really relate to the next) I'd say it's not worth the aesthetic cost.
What I'm wondering is whether there is an elegant way to implement these pop-up menus so that they meet the Web Content Accessibilty Guidlines, specifically checkpoint 6.3. These guidelines have the force of law behind them in some countries now, so the standards-aware among us gotta keep them in mind. Given how useful and practical pop-up menus are, it's hard to believe that the guidlines rule them out.
Posted by Mr. X 2003.06.02, 14:39
you didn't have a entry link to categories archives?
I'm kinda proud that I had that before you then ('cause you''re my reference in term of blog design coolness…).
What I've been thinking about was how to have the individual entries "next" and "previous" link to filter only one category, so you can browse through one cat on the individual archive level. would be particularly nice for my "monster of the week" thing…
Posted by Peter 2003.06.02, 20:26
Thanks very much, Jeremy, for pointing out the new and improved Related Entries widget – I had it up and running within a half-hour of reading your post!
One question though: How do you get your template to insert "no related entries found"? (I looked at the IfEmpty plugin, but didn't think it would do the trick.)
[I notice that your individual entry pages are inconsistent – some have "Related Entries", some "Related or Random Entries", some "Possibly Related Entries, and some none at all. Are you being fiendishly clever, or do you need to do a rebuild?]
Cheers
Posted by Lee 2003.06.04, 09:18
> You might want to rename the "Recent Posts" pop-up
> to "Preceding Posts"I use the "offset" feature on my website. My blog contains the last 10 posts and then my archive list the last 10 that proceeded it as recent posts.
Here is the code I use:
MTEntries lastn="10" offset="10"
Posted by jh 2003.06.04, 21:54
Khalid —
> I'd say it's not worth the aesthetic cost.
Agreed. But another thing is that I sometimes like to click through the entries sequentially to see if or how things join together (it's genrally a disappointing experience, but sometimes adjacent posts have an unintended connection).
> What I'm wondering is whether there is an elegant way
> to implement these pop-up menusAargh! There is much work to be done here to make things acceptable. The pull-downs are high on the list. It's a simple matter to get MT listing out the contents of the menus as links in the "noscript" attribute, but it's a different matter getting around to it.
Mr. X —
> you didn't have a entry link to categories archives?
I have to admit, it just never occured to me. Sometimes the obvious is very elusive! =)
> to have the individual entries "next" and "previous" link
> to filter only one categoryThis is a very good idea. I wonder how difficult it would be to do (I don't think I've seen it done anywhere that I can recall). A little bit of digging around in the MT docs may be called for.
Peter —
> How do you get your template to insert "no related
> entries found"?In the MTSQLEntries tag where Adam has the query, you can (according to a snippet buried in Brad's documentation for the MTSQL plug-in) add a default attribute which will display if no results are returned from the query. Mine looks like this:
default="<li>No related entries found</li>"
You must use HTML entities for any code you want to include — "<" will produce "<" but "<" will NOT work (excuse the shouting but it took me an hour to realise this ;-).
Lee —
> I use the "offset" feature on my website.
This is a good idea, too. I've been looking at the main page recently and getting annoyed that the recent entries list simply restates what's already on the page. Definitely time to kill some redundancy here.
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