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Heavy Plant

Walk past a "Heavy Plant" warning and wonder vaguely if the trees thought it was for them; if whoever put it up had enough imag...

2005-11-17

Some changes

Regular visitors to the site (Dad, Chris, Ben and Dave) will notice that there have been some relatively large changes to the way this site appears.

Most noteably the intelligent expand/collapse code for the main posts for which I have to credit ChuBlogga!, who I must also link to because of the discovery of Star Wars Transformers.

I have also added an expandable linklist in the sidebar showing all the links as well as the randomly selected link. I have also hidden the archives in the same way and sorted them from oldest to newest.

Most of the code for these changes is available through the Blogger Hacks page, but quite a lot of it requires a bit of knowledge about JavaScript and CSS. Anyone struggling with other bits of code should also have a look at the W3Schools HTML tutorials.

The biggest change though has been working out the new comments code which has caused all kinds of formatting problems. From now on you will see that I am using Blogger's own commenting rather than the old HaloScan service. This is for the sake of simplicity as well as the fact that it allows me to add features like listing the commenter's names underneath the post. I have tried to make everyone's comments appear in a different colour but because of some techie reasons I won't go into this hasn't worked the way I thought it would. I am working on some more JavaScript to sort this out but it will be a long time coming.

I have also written some code to allow any number of different bits of text to appear in the comment link (attempts to focus etc.). These currently range from 'still fuzzy' at zero comments, to 'this post has achieved nirvana' at more than ten. If anyone can come up with better things than I please feel free to suggest them. Also please feel free to copy the code which you can do by right clicking and selecting 'view source' in most cases.

Now all I need to do is create some kind of category system for the posts, which as I've said before is a right ballache at the moment. What I really want is for blogger to create their own! Come on blogger, categories, categories, categories!

2 comments:

  1. And look, the comments come up in this lovely blue colour!

    ..you people have no idea...

    ReplyDelete
  2. splendid stuff...what colour shall I be?

    ReplyDelete