If you click the link above (and have been to the site since Thursday), you'll notice that there are no new articles on Scary-Crayon. So what could it be? Notice anything different at all? Hmmmmmmm???

Yeah, new main page layout. It's a temporary thing, mind you, but the final layout won't be too much different. The section links will probably be text links (perhaps flanked by Madballs images or something :D), and the section indices will probably look more like the main page, with the sidebar and such. There'll be a new site header graphic. That's about it.

What I'll need to implement those changes is a news posting program of sorts -- basically I want something that'll let me key in a headline, four lines of text, the image name and the alt text, and it'll stick the code in on the main page and the appropriate section page and there we go. I don't really need anything to manage the articles themselves, per se -- I'd prefer to keep things simple with them and just link them back to the main page (and maybe their respective section indices as well) -- so I'd rather continue coding those by hand. It's just that with the main page and the section pages getting content added to them on a continual basis, I want a program to handle those and to limit the number of posts on them to keep them from getting too large. What Aaron's running over at Moviebomb would work pretty well, actually. A number of blogging programs might do the trick. I just need to figure out which one I want to use and get it up and running. Something with a commenting function might be great too, actually, except that if I continue to code the article html pages myself I'm not sure where people would leave their comments. Sure, they could comment from a link in the article "preview" on the main or archive page, but I'd rather them be able to do it from the actual page too. I suppose I could use a blogging program for the html articles too -- after all, it wouldn't be that much different from the plugging into a template that I do now -- but there are two problems with that.

1.) I'm not sure how that would work for the occasional multi-page articles I do.

2.) I really like the simple URLs as they are now. Might sound trite, but there's something really right about A Crayon Haiku #9 being located at --

http://www.scary-crayon.com/haiku/9/

-- as opposed to --

http://www.scary-crayon.com/haiku/viewnews.cgi?id
=UfHeAkSfOsApJfEsWeJwE

-- y'know? Even --

http://www.scary-crayon.com/index.php?id=009&category=2

-- looks kinda off to me. As does the broken look of the above lines.

But to resolve the commenting issue, I may end up adding a form to articles so that people can submit comments directly to me via e-mail -- without having to open up their own e-mail programs, correct my e-mail link for the spam filter, etc. I actually like that option, except that it would eliminate the possibility of discussions springing up on comments boards. But then again, that doesn't bother me so much. Scary-Crayon isn't a message board (though I may end up getting it a free forum one of these days) and I've got limited bandwidth here. Not that I've come remotely close to using all of it -- the most traffic we've gotten so far was in February, during which only 33% of my total allowed bandwidth was consumed -- but still, I'd rather keep that sort of thing to a minimum, at least on SC. The blog gets a decent amount of unique visits a day (one or two-thirds of what SC gets), but I suspect that only about ten people read it regularly (if that many). So if you feel like talking here or whatever, go for it. 🙂

So basically I just want something that'll let me post an item (consisting of a title, a 4-line description, and a small graphic) to multiple pages (the main page and the appropriate archive page) at once, and possibly that'll let me update other things on the page (like the Site Info box and the Links section) with relative ease. And maybe a snippet of code that I can add to the bottom of articles that'll insert a commenting box for people to shoot me impressions and such.

And I guess that'll do it for this post. So yeah, if you have any suggestions about programs that might suit my needs, send me an e-mail or post a comment! Keep in mind that I know very little about Perl, but I am fairly good at figuring out what stuff does by looking at code. (I self-taught myself html doing that, with help/suggestions from good ol' Pak and Bo and the boys in #db. Before Pak and Bo left and those who remained saw fit to ban me from the channel. Oh, memories! :D) And so far the modifications I made to the Reblogger code seem to be working properly.

Any other suggestions regarding the final main/archive page layout are welcome too. I'll probably ignore you if you suggest a new color scheme, though -- while it's certainly "less exciting," there's something about the dull red and grey scheme that I just love about SC. It's partly because -- given the amount of time I spend looking at the site -- the less vibrant colors don't offend my eyes, but maybe it's also directly related to the fact that it's less exciting. It's like the clothes that I wear (though with considerably much less black). It's like a newsletter the Nosferatu Clan would design. And the colors stay out of the way and let the articles themselves draw people in -- if someone said, "Yeah, I went to Scary-Crayon, but I left because the colors weren't exciting enough," I'd probably shrug and say, "Eh, your loss -- you just missed out on 4Cs!"

Okay, so maybe that's not really a loss...but you get the idea. 🙂