WebsiteWhatnot

I’ve gotten things to mostly where I want them, though I’m still not completely satisfied but that’s unlikely to ever happen anyway.

Feel free to comment, make suggestions or boo.

I apologize for the time it has taken to get to this point.  Part of my issue is that I’m stubborn.  I’ll latch on to one thing and try to get it to bend to my wishes, but after a while I have to admit defeat and scrap it and move on to something else.  So I’ll spend the time but in the end have nothing to show for it except time wasted.  Of course, it’s a lesson learned for the next time that particular issue comes up.

Things to note (in order that I think of them)…

  • The pages, those selected from the menu, are to display the most recent post.  I had a plugin for this but did not like it.  As such, this is now coded as a function but still needs the css for proper formatting
  • There will be 2-3 ad placements.  In the top right beside the logo.  If someone can confirm this, it does not seem to display for me in Chrome except incognito.  Firefox works fine.  I’ve not tried IE.
  • Posts have been assigned to categories, but not all.  I’m not entirely sure where some posts should reside, some reside in more than one category.  I don’t recommend assigning more than 2 categories to a post as categories are used to determine which posts are “related” on the right hand sidebar.
  • During the import from blogger, it offered me only one opportunity to assign an author to a post, so all are assigned to Headley.  If posts should be reassigned let me know and we can change them.
  • The front page slider has, for some reason, decided to dick around with the images.  I don’t know why.  I’ll have a look or make use of support for this.
  • I get why people would choose to create their own theme package (I’m not there yet).  The theme I chose it closest to what I had originally envisioned.  Now that it has progressed, the site doesn’t make use of many of the things that the theme offers.  Unfortunately this results in a somewhat bloated code, though this shouldn’t make a huge impact except wherein that useless code is bad (not saying that it is).
  • Earlier I had the date and search box on the same line, but the search box was causing me grief with the post title, so I scrapped it (see above), redid it and placed it on the menu bar.  As such, the date/search line was removed.  If you feel the date should be there somewhere, let me know.
  • Images are still pulled from the blogger site.  It can stay this way, or we can re-point them to the same images that are on the wordpress site.  I’ve not found an easy way to do this outside of editing the post, editing the image and selecting the image on the wordpress site (it knows which image it is on the wordpress site, go figure).

Kelli.  If you see anything that can be improved, fixed, removed, evokes a WTF then have at it.  Let me know of the changes so I  A> don’t blow them up or B> can learn.

About Headly Westerfield

Calling himself “A liberally progressive, sarcastically cynical, iconoclastic polymath,” Headly Westerfield has been a professional writer all his adult life.

10 thoughts on “WebsiteWhatnot

    1. Personally I don’t like Google ads. I’m testing only 6 of my 5000+ readers said they “didn’t mind them.” For you, ask yourself what type of ad would you not mind if you were trading a business or news column? Does the ad fit in ( have anything to do) with the overall goal of the website?

  1. Let’s leave all comments here as if it’s a thread, so that everything is in the same place.

    These are not comprehensive and I may add more as I think of them.

    1). How come “NOW” in the logo looks like it was pained to resemble a cow? While I had it as all black to match the site colours, I wasn’t committed to that.

    2). I’m not sure what you mean by your first point above. [Please number your points in the future for easier reference.]

    3). I need someone to hold my hand and walk me through “categories.” I’m still not sure how they are used internally, how they relate to SEO. Kelli: If you have time, ‘splain this to me again ’cause it didn’t imprint from the last time.

    4). All Blogger posts were by Headly Westerfield, so that works. However, I want the ability to assign posts to any name I wish, even if I were to make it up on the spot.

    5). I was always undecided about an advert in then banner space. I’ll accept Kelli’s advice on this. Where would adverts fall?

    6). On page http://notnowsilly.local/another-open-email-to-miamis-public/ I note the formatting is off. Other pages I checked not. Anyway, the body of the text is not going to the far right of that column like it should. I’ve not checked every page, but I assume there are others like this.

    7). I am paying Google (which Blogger is a part of) a small monthly fee of $2 for pic storage. I’ll let Kelli tell me where I should store the pics.

    8). Are all the old posts now there? One thing I’ve been concerned about are links within articles that point to other NNS posts. I assume these will go to the old site. How do we get over this hump? I don’t have to remove the old site, but need a way to alert readers that they’ve wandered into the deep archives and need to use the back button.

    9). I need a new term for LANDING PAGE because I am told that’s the name for the dot-index page; front door. What I mean by LANDING PAGE is a page that is arrived at by clicking on a menu item (say, J$ Wars) which then takes one to a page that looks like this one: http://notnowsilly.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-johnny-dollar-wars-chapter-and-verse.html

    While that one already exists, I would do the same thing for PASTORAL LETTERS and others. Just a quick graphic and paragraph about the post w/ a link.

    10). I am not thrilled with what I gave you for the menu items. Because you said they are easily changed, I will probably rethink these.

    11). ALL TIME TOP TEN spells out TEN. TODAY’S TOP 10 does not. They should match.

    12). The aspect ratio problem of the graphics on the slider crawls up my back. I know you are aware of it. However, is it because every one of those pictures are a different size with different aspect ratios to begin with? They were not chosen to be matching.

    13). On the slider, can one add the text, or is it limited to the first x number of characters I see now?

    15). How many items will fit in the slider?

    That’s all for now. I have to run and help an elderly neighbour secure all the stuff on her balcony. The hurricane may keep me from here due to power failure. I will be able to get phone text and facebook IMs, but I don’t want to do too much on my phone because I need to save power.

    With all my love,
    Aunty Em

    1. About the site in general.,.still multiple issues. I probably better jump off here as my comments:suggestions have been completely ignored. ALL of this could have been built and populated in a week or less, without a single line of code. Good luck. Kelli

  2. 1. That’s actually how I received the graphic and I just haven’t done anything about it yet. If we’re not going with a header ad, we can go with a graphic that is full width, or place something over there such as the donate button, random quote or anything…

    2. When you choose an item, such as Pastoral Letters, that menu item is linked to a page which you can basically put anything on. A post is your actual article such as “Don’t Give up The Fort – A Pastoral Letter”. In this case, the page has been configured to display the latest post, so the content is essentially dynamic. When a newer post is added to “Pastoral Letters” that new post will be displayed on that page automatically. If you were to create a new article (or post) for ‘pastoral letters’ you’d assign it to the pastoral letters category so that it would appear under the proper menu item (as the new post displayed on the page, or under “related”).

    4. There are a few ways to go about this. There is a plugin that allows you to make up any name, but it seems to want to choose your account’s avatar for that author. There seem to be other plugins which allow you to assign the article to an author that already exists in your system, but I’ve not yet tried any of those. If you do have a set number of pseudonyms, the latter would probably work better.

    5. See #1

    6. I’m not surprised that there might be formatting issues, it’s bound to happen when you move from one platform to another. I’ll look into what options are available to make fixing any formatting issues easier.

    7. We’ll see about moving the images, but I may need assistance with this one.

    8. All posts, up to about a week ago, are on the site. I’ve done a search and replace to substitute notnowsilly.com with the blogger URL, but this is by no means foolproof. There is an add-on which will go through and check for broken links but it may not help if the link is still active on the original site. We might be able to search for anything referencing the old site that is not a image. We can do that with a development site first.

    9. You can call it the index page, default page, main page. (eg: Johnny$ main page) There isn’t any expected terminology, or none that I’m aware of.

    10. They are easy to change, so long as the general idea remains the same so that the categories assigned continue to make sense.

    11. Will fix.

    12. The slider will need to be reworked. When I put in the slider, I tried not to too closely mimic other sliders but it’s current incarnation just doesn’t sit well with me either.

    13. There are many options available for the slider. Currently it is limited to a set number of characters, but it takes in to consideration the words so that it doesn’t end in the middle of a word.

    14.

    15. There is no technical limit to the number of items in the slider, but obviously you’ll want to limit them from a usability standpoint.

    Stay safe!

  3. 1). Odd about the graphic. I just looked at the original again and the NOW is all black.

    I’m liking how the banner ‘breathes’ with all that white space. However, how hard is it to just show me your suggestion(s)?

    2). When you say “When a newer post is added to “Pastoral Letters” that new post will be displayed on that page automatically.” does that mean it replaces the previous post, or get added to a page where all the stories are hyperlinked? [What I desire is the latter, even if that has to be done manually.]

    You also say “If you were to create a new article (or post) for ‘pastoral letters’ you’d assign it to the pastoral letters category so that it would appear under the proper menu item (as the new post displayed on the page, or under “related”).”

    I don’t want to see the menu items grow (much) beyond the main rubric(s), which is why I am suggesting pages.

    4). Not entirely sure how many nom de plumes I may use, or whether I will use any at all. However, there is a plan to open NNS to other authors. So, at the very least, I want to be able to credit the author by the name they want.

    9). I just want to be using the same terminology as you & Kelli. That way we’re talking the same language and there are no surprises.

    10. I’m still thinking about this. I’ll get something to you in a day or so. Sorry. I thought I had it right before, but wasn’t happy when I saw it. That’s all on me.

    Certainly I would like at least 1 item added: Either called “Who am us?” or something less cute like NNNS Staff, which will also have contact info.

    13). My question is more: Can the slider text be anything we (or I) write, or does it grab the first x number of characters from a post? I want the former option, as opposed to the latter.

    14). OOOOPS!

    15). I would like more items in the slider than 4. Only because it will look more dynamic if it’s choosing among a longer list.

    ==============================
    New Stuff:

    16). Just for the hell of it I decided to go EDIT the J$ Wars page from the button at the bottom that says EDIT. Here’s what I saw:

    [display-posts tag=”jdollar-wars” posts_per_page=”1″ image_size=”maggie-lite-block-big-thumb” include_title=”false” wrapper=”div” include_date=”false” order=”ASC” orderby=”date”]
    [display-posts tag=”jdollar-wars” posts_per_page=”1″ include_title=”true” wrapper=”div” include_date=”false” order=”ASC” orderby=”date”]

    [display-posts tag=”jdollar-wars” posts_per_page=”1″ include_title=”false” include_content=”true” wrapper=”div” include_date=”false” order=”ASC” orderby=”date”]
    [display-posts tag=”jdollar-wars” posts_per_page=”1″ include_title=”false” include_content=”false” wrapper=”div” include_date=”true” order=”ASC” orderby=”date”]

    While I’ve written WordPress posts from scratch, the view was more WYSIWYG, without these codes in VISUAL, while the TEXT pane had the basic HTML code.

    I just backed out of it.

    Can’t think of anything more right now. I have a migraine.

    With all my love,
    Uncle Em

  4. QUICK UPDATE:

    Through the site’s search feature I found UPDATED!!! ► The Johnny Dollar Wars ► Chapter and Verse at Permalink: http://notnowsilly.local/the-johnny-dolla…hapter-and-verse/

    Then I hit the EDIT button at the bottom. This VUSUAL pane on the page is WYSIWYG, without all that stuff in brackets.

    This page, BTW, is the EXACT place I want people to arrive at when they click J$ Wars from the main menu. It’s also what I am talking about when I talk about LANDING PAGES that are arrived at by clicking a menu item.

    With all my love,
    Aunty Headly

  5. 2. Any newer article would replace the previous article, but we can certainly have more than one article per page. The code that is there on the page such as the J$ page is what WordPress refers to as shortcode. Shortcode references a piece of coding somewhere within the wordpress site, often the code to invoke a widget. The shortcode that is there grabs the most recent article from the category. In this case jdollar-wars. If you go into and edit a post, on the right hand side about half way down you’ll see a section for categories.

    However, the code that is there for the one you saw will be changed. All that coding will be reduced to something like [mostrecentpost postcat=”pastoral-letters”]. Though I’ll probably be changing that at some point soon too. The way I go about doing something evolves over time. The Display-Posts shortcode is from a widget you can download from wordpress, but I felt I’d have more flexibility if I just did it my own way.

    10. There are a few menu items at the bottom of the page, there is an About Us, Contact Us, FAQ and information about the website.

    13. The text can be anything you’d like. The slider is quite flexible and seems to be able to do a lot.

    15. Adding more items to the slider is easy. Go into a post that you’d like to add to the slider and on the right hand side of the screen will be the “Categories” box. Just check Featured, save the update and the post will be added to the slider. Note that the slider is cached, so the new item may not appear immediately.

    Speaking of cached. The site will be cached when it hits the ground. When a page/post is first visited the system will generate a static HTML file that it will serve in subsequent visits, speeding things up. I’ve it turned off right now because I don’t want to battle it if changes are made. The cache is cleared over night.

  6. Comments & questions in no particular order, numbers do not refer to anything above:

    1). Here’s the new MENU BAR:

    HOME: (no change)
    UNPACKING: (no change)
    PASTORAL LETTERS: (no change)
    RACE RELATIONS > The Colour Line (no sub menu)
    > Detroit (no sub menu)
    > No Skin In The Game
    > Where The Sidewalk Ends
    MEDIA: (1 change: Remove Watergate and add Thursday)
    WATERGATE: (new 1st tier menu item
    THE J$ WARS
    FARCE AU PAIN
    SHOP
    FARCE AU PAIN
    2). I think I’d like 7 items in the slider. I assume it’ll always be the latest 7 posts automatically.

    3). I am trying to understand how the template uses CATEGORIES to group posts, which are then used as RECOMMENDED at the bottom of the page. I think I need to understand so I can better come up with a list of CATEGORIES. Is there some literature you can recommend? Or, give me a tutorial?

    4)) Can there be sliders for any occasion? Like what I was pondering is whether, f’rinstance, on the bottom of the PASTORAL LETTER page (which, if I understand correctly, will always have the most recent Pastoral Letter) a different slider that cycles through *ALL* of the Pastoral Letters, no matter how many there may eventually be.

    Or, am I just trying to reinvent the wheel?

    5). I made and published a post. Or at least I think I did. I better check.

    Talk soonish.

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