Is it Saturday already? Time usually crawls with me, but this week seems to have gone by unusually quickly -- likely because I spent the majority of it lost in php and graphics and photos and whatnot. As I noted in the Scary-Crayon blog, I've recently decided to start using WordPress to manage the index and content pages as well -- but seeing as how I hadn't originally planned to use it to that effect and had placed it elsewhere in the site hierarchy, making that adjustment is has required some major internal structural changes. After literally sitting at the computer from 8AM to 11PM-ish on Thursday, though, I seem to have almost worked out all of the kinks there... but now, of course, I actually have to add all of the blurbs that I've written to introduce the articles since 2004 into the WP database. I've written hundreds of those things! So that may take a while, or maybe not since I'm so bloody obsessive. And even when I finish that, I'll have to tweak the layout and make some new changes in order to introduce them, as I've decided to create new categories for the game reviews and short stories (etc.) that had previously been lumped in with the miscellaneous pieces. Fun times.

So in addition to the changes to the SC blog and php code that these updates demand (which, I should note, also moved me to make some minor changes over here as well), I've also been fooling with lots of graphics stuff and text techniques in preparation for the minor layout changes. This morning, I found myself fiddling around with the Dalek at right to create a text-wrapping effect. It seems to work well in IE7 and Firefox (I have no idea how it looks in IE6 or other browsers, though), but it is problematic in that it's far too involved for its own good. I mean, I spend a lot of time doing image work on articles as it is, but somehow it seems a bit over the top to take the time to measure out and slice an image into 19 individual components (yep!) for something that hopefully takes a backseat to the text wrapping around it anyway. It might be cooler if Scary-Crayon had fewer pages and were less ostensibly text-centric -- and I'll probably do something like this on the "about" page that I design for the site and maybe even incorporate it into future tweaks to the blog -- but I can't see taking the time to do it on a regular basis. I'm almost certain that there are programs out there that can do this, but I'm not too confident about their quality because Paint Shop Pro also has a feature to do it and it's absolute rubbish. I had better luck copying and pasting selections snapped to a grid and going from there. There's a way to replicate the effect without slicing an image by using sandbag divs -- this article was actually what inspired me to attempt to do it via the image slicing method -- but using fixed image backgrounds and modifying external css rules is really impractical for individual articles. Ah well.

Okay, that is all for now. Thanks for reading, even if that didn't make a whole lot of sense to you! I will probably continue fooling with this for the next few hours before taking a break to actually work on a new SC comic/article/whatever. Ja! 🙂