Really, Really, Rediculously Good-Looking

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The redesign continues.

The update is going well, and I’m back to the serif font. What I’m doing now is removing all of these extra tags that are still hanging around from the original Movable Type template. I had originally tried stripping them en masse from my templates, but it resulted in too radical a change–overhauling my Main Index meant that the Category, Date, and Individual Archives as well as my Search Template would all require a redesign before I could publish the site…too much, too quickly.

Current influences include: Mark, Jeffrey, Dave, Sherif, Dean, Heather, Rachelle, and Doug (if you look at any of those sites, don’t miss Doug’s–there’s so much understated style there). I’m kicking around the idea of finding a design “metaphor” to stick with. Not having one and wanting to pile as much content onto the homepage as possible caused me to design this site to look like a spreadsheet. Removing the calendar from the navigation (who was using it, anyway?) helped, but I would like to use white space more effectively.

Also, does anyone have any suggestions on managing more “static” web content? If you look at any of those examples above, you’ll see that they all have “sections” of their sites: photos, links, bios, etc. I’d like to do this as well, but am having a hard time trying to figure out how to manage them with my CMS (Movable Type). Suggestions to that effect would also be much appreciated.

Additionally: I opened the site in IE6 and have a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom. Mozilla doesn’t have this problem, nor does Opera 7. Can anyone offer some insight?

Oh, and–just in passing–it looks like my birthday came early this year. :)

12 thoughts on “Really, Really, Rediculously Good-Looking”

  1. I can actually help you on this one K!

    Here’s a few ways to use MT to manage “static” pages.

    Way 1
    Create a new blog and call it “Static”. Delete every template except the Individual Archive template. Also, make sure your blog configuration only allows for Individual Archives (in the CMS, go to Weblog Config–>archiving)
    Download the MTEntry and MTOtherBlog plugins and install them (this is insanely easy).
    In your “Static” blog, create a new entry (let’s do “Links” for now) and call it links. In the entry, put the code you want to use as the “static” content. This way, everytime you want to change something, you just change it on this entry.
    Go to your main blog and create a new index template called “Links”. Place all of your actual static content (your header, sidebar, macros) here
    In the section where you want your “links” content to be use this code:

    <MTOtherBlog
    blog_id="the number of your Static blog"><MTEntry id="the
    entry id # of the Links entry on your static page"><MTEntryBody></MTEntry></MTOtherBlog>

    The only drawback to this is that when you make an adjustment to the links entry in your Static blog, you also have to rebuild the Links template in your main blog- which is a minor detail!

    I will send you some other ways to do this as well, but I have company over! Later K!

  2. Okay, that’s it: no more HTML in comments. Blocking scammers & porn sites, marring the site color scheme, and now mucking up my comment bulleting? It’s just too much of a liability.

    Thanks for the advice Jai. I already had a sense about creating a “static” blog, but I didn’t realize you could use MTOtherBlog to have cross-blog Content Management–very cool.

  3. OH! I see, because it was list items inside a larger list item tag… I should have figured that before I wrote it. Sorry. I think maybe just text formatiing should be ok- you know; bold, italic, striketrough- the simple basics.

  4. I would just like to point out that ‘static’ content is best served from straight from a server, such as apache. using blogging software or what ever to push static content is never the ‘best’ way to do it.

    What i do at work for static pages is develop a template and drop my own markup langauge into it. Then run it against some perl scripts to merge content and html and dump the results ont he server. Its a very nice way to do. Once i have a new template it takes me about 30 seconds to change the pages i manage (when i was covering for the web master last summer, it too 45 seconds to touch all 2000 pages on the site) …

    with that said, i use zope to push my ‘static’ content on my personal site … which is prolly just as bad as having blogging software do it ;-) . I’m still developing a solution to this problem, which currently is taking the form of navigating to the section i want to add static content to and adding the management URL after it.

    example (the url edit page isn’t on my live server yet, its still sitting in my bedroom ):
    https://secure.the-forgotten.org/tech/EditThisPage

    EditThisPage only exists in one spot on the server, zope is kind enough to search through all the parents of a directory to file what I want, and is smart enough to drop information where i ask it to.

    This solution is a mix of Python and DTML, and is still exceedingly buggy (because I have very little time to devote to making it work … ) … but, this is the best i’ve come up with so far. Content can also be quickly relocated to other places on the server … all its location information is being stored as properties in the zope database.

    Previously, I used a product called MonsterHash to achieve basically the same thing. For out-right static content MonsterHash was really neat. If you wanted anything more than “edit once and leave it” (for the most part) it took a little bit of perl hacking to make it a little more forgiving … but, for what I was doing previously it was small, fast, and didn’t require anything except a cgi-bin and access to perl to use it.

    But, zope is far cooler :)

    Altp.

  5. All in all, static content is just that- static, right? So if it’s just a few pages, you could actually (I know this is old school) just update the few pages by hand and then FTP them (Oh, MY! Did he say FTP?) up to the server. But I digress with another solution for K and his MT addicted needs (I’m with you on this one buddy…)-

    1. Download the MTFilterCtegories plugin for MT.
    2. In your main blog, create a Category called “Links”
    3. Create a new index template called “Links” and put all your surrounding code in it (Sidebar, Header, etc.)
    4. Put this following code where you want your “Links” content:

    <MTCategories>
    <MTFilterCategories include="Links">
    <MTEntries lowercase="1"><MTEntryBody></MTEntries>
    </MTFilterCategories>
    </MTCategories>

    (Make sure that the attribute “lowercase=”1″” is in your MTEntries tag- this lets all entries in the category “Links” be displayed)

    -Now anytime you create an entry in the Category “Links” it will show up in on this page where the above code is written.

    One small drawback to this way is that you have to tweak some code to not show the “Links” category on your main, archive, and category temlpates. Surround your <MTEntries> tag with this code in each of these templates:

    <MTFilterCategories exclude="Links"> </MTFilterCategories>
    :) Now you have a choice. :P

  6. –
    (Oh, MY! Did he say FTP?)
    –

    ftp is insecure. use sftp, scp or webdav over ssl instead.

    I find scp to be the most universally excepted for most places. Assuming they have ssh installed, scp will work (and if they don’t have ssh installed, there is a much more serious problem than updating static pages ;-) ). webdav over ssl is the easiest (just use Nautilus/Windows Explorer/Mac Finder to copy stuff over), but most places don’t support it. I haven’t seen sftp anywhere in prolly 2 years, but i’m sure its still used in some places.

    Altp.

  7. Guys, thanks for the discussion. Very insightful.

    Re: using MT or not. The way I see it, static content–though it doesn’t change very often–is still content, and so I’d like to manage it through a CMS. FTP (or whatever) or custom scripting doesn’t do it for me because they’re less-than-elegant solutions. “Elegant” being, in my definition, the ability to integrate with my already-existing, already-working, simple-to-use content management solution.

    Short of these things, CSS and good document markup would let me build “static” pages with reasonably small effort, but I have a feeling that there are already great solutions out there (I mean, so many of the blogs I linked to in this article are doing it–they can’t all be doing it by hand, can they?).

    So far, the MTOtherBlog idea is winning out. ;-)

  8. Yeah. MTOtherBlog is cool. That 2nd possibility I mentioned works great for the redesign of brinkofski.com, but I realized that that site has NO Individual Archives… it’s entirely category driven. It works better for a whole MT site that is entirely “static”, not so super good for what you’re looking to do (although it’d work).

    By the way, did you title this article after my wife? I think you did!

  10. Well, sure it’d be Ethicaly difficult! I guess I just naturally put those two things together- you know really, really, rediculously good-looking and “Becky” are like synonyms or something ;)

  11. Um, isnt MT static anyway? hence the rebuild thing?

    So why not just change the templates to only pull certain categories, and use permalinks for other stuff? Seems silly to use an entirely seperate blog for it, when categories would do just fine. Then again, if it’s purely static, why not just upload a static page via sftp?

  12. Hi Ryan. By “static” pages, I mean ones that are not changed often rather than HTML pages that are built by MovableType. This would include an about page at kennsarah.net/about, kennsarah.net/links, etc.

    Using categories is compelling, but I really have no idea how I’d do it, which is why I wrote this blog. :)

    Re: uploading by hand, see #4.

    Nothing is ever really static, of course. By using the CMS, I’m trying to future-proof my site maintenance.