The sidebar widget of pages was getting too long to be useful, so I took it out, and readers can see all the links to letters on the Site Map, or in the year/month menus (when all are finished). In addition, because the 1951 letters are all one group, each page needed to be numbered to appear in the correct chronological order, an annoying job, but that’s done now. I’m nearly done with February, and will announce that in a few days, but fishing tomorrow.
Category: site design
Blog Feeds and Web Pages
The blog on this site can be subscribed to as a feed, so that my “site” followers are notified every time I make a new blog post. The same is not true for pages on the site, which are static and not connected to each other—I can put a page anywhere on the site and add more all the time, changing the arrangement of them into sub menus, etc.
For this site, where the letters are the most important feature, it means that when I finish new ones, each on their own page, none of my 19 followers is notified. That’s one reason I’ve been adding friendly menus, so it’s a little easier to check a list of letters, whether in the sidebar widget or on the site map, and see if a new one has been added. But it requires manual checking, and that can be a drag.
So, another thing I’ll start is making a brief post announcing when a month’s worth of letters is done.
Consider this post to be an announcement that January 1942 is done.
I wish new pages sent out announcements, but they won’t. The lovely site Letters of Note posts all its letters in blog posts, but that wouldn’t work here where a timely arrangement is needed.
One more menu aid
Eventually, the Letters widget in the sidebar will become too long to look right, so I added a Site Map page that does pretty much the same thing on a single page, but it also lists all other pages in alphabetical order. When I get further along (meaning when I quit letting summer interfere with transcribing), I’ll take out the widget.
Yes, I had to look up farther v. further to confirm my word choice.
Menu Arranging
I added some friendlier menus for the letters so you don’t have to go through so many clicks to get to a particular month. In the main menu, there are three levels under the letters, so you can choose a particular month under 1942, for example. Of course, this primarily applies to users on a computer browser or on a tablet in landscape mode. Portrait mode on a tablet or phone always displayed a more detailed menu.
I added a widget in the sidebar that displays all the letter pages—again most useful in a computer browser.
Hope this helps; I know it helps me!
A New Readable Theme
As you might notice, I changed the blog theme from Elemin to Lovecraft. I liked Elemin, but it was hard to read with my old eyes, especially in doing transcriptions. Unless you work in WordPress, you might not know that the text size looks the same in the editor as it does on the published page, so that small font was hard to work with, even with my computer glasses. Lovecraft has a large, readable font that looks good on all devices.
The large font makes it easier to transcribe using the Mac split screen now available with the El Capitan OS:
Lovecraft is a relatively new theme. It’s simple, but has a space in the footer for widgets—one of my favorite site features. I feel that if you have read or scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page, there ought to be something there for you to read.
I don’t know how the theme expresses H. P. Lovecraft or if it’s supposed to, but it’s working for me, as long as Cthulhu doesn’t emerge from it. I might put more effort into having featured images on some of the site pages, instead of the same header on them all, but I don’t have any ideas at the moment.
