Short Explanation So here's where the blog goes. So basically, there's nothing fancy about this. The title will be a permalink to the post page, and the post content will follow. The posts will all be feature length posts, so I should be able to run no more than 3 on a page (maybe five, depends on how the spacing with the Short Ends go) and then just have a link on the bottom to "more entries" which essentially should just take you to the archives page. Maybe I should have five posts and just scrap that "more entries" idea. Okay, scrapped. As for formatting, it's pretty simple. Blockquotes will be treated as simple indented paragraphs, all posts will be left aligned, images will not have a border. I'm probably going to stick to Arial, especially since most people don't use it anymore. Verdana was big for a while, and then Georgia took the world by storm. I'm going to use Arial. The post footer will have the date of the post (which will also be a permalink) and a link to "comment" where they will get the post page with trackbacks and comments directly highlighted. I still have to work out how the post page will look. Other than that, I'm thinking a very simple and faint grey rule below the footer should give the site some good visual hierarchy. I'm not sure if I should have a grey rule below the header logo (it will be a logo, not the text it is right now), but I guess that's something we can work out. Oh, and no tagging. As much as I want to game Technorati, I'm going against tagging and going with simple categories. We'll only list the categories on the post page though. . 31/08/06 - COMMENTS (0) More Functionality A short post here on the rest of the functionality of the site, since I haven't explained that yet. As you can tell the Short Ends are already described within the column. The sidebar next to that has a navigation link structure at the top. The About link will go to a page that is about me and the site. The archives link, obviously, will go to the archives page. The photos link will go to Flickr (easier that way). And subscribe is just a direct link to the blog's RSS feed, which should include the short ends anyhow (since I'm embedding them, right?) so everything's in one feed. Following that is the four lists. I'm currently keeping four blogs up to date, and I want to aggregate them here. All I want to do is list the title of the five most recent posts on each site (I'm sure there's a way to do this with RSS) so people can click through to the different kinds of content I'm creating. Eloquation is this page, of course. blogTO is a daily posting thing. Borrowing Privileges is not public yet, so we'll have to put off the implementation of this one for a little while. Quality is Relative is my VOX blog. I will not be scraping my PMITBS blog. Below all that is just some site crazy stuff that I kinda need to have in there. It will have links to my about page, my CC license, my tour (the tour is a different page where I will have a videocast and a link to my favorite posts), my archives, my contact page. There will also be links to Krishna, Wordpress, and Bluehost. Because I like linking. Above both sidebars is the search bar. I'm not sure if the search should be life (pushing the results down into the sidebar area) or if you should just go to a search page. Does Wordpress have a native search built into it? Can i just create a similarly themed search page? Anyways, I haven't included the text entry bar here because I can't do that in OmniGraffle, but you get the picture. Speaking of pictures, that photo above is one of my Flickr photos. So ideally, that image should change, displaying the most recent photo I tag with "eloquation" on Flickr. That way, I can limit myself to only tagging photos that will fit the 500x375 dimensions, and I can control what's going up on the blog, but it still changes regularly. I'm sure there's a way of doing this, right? . 31/08/06 - COMMENTS (0) Sizes and Dimensions So now let's talk dimensions. I happen to like how the site looks here in OmniGraffle, but I know things change when you get into HTML and CSS. The photo is 500x375, and the search bar below it is 500x50. I've got a 30 pixel padding between edge and text for that search box area, but it won't matter if we center (vertically and horizontally) the content there. Each of the sidebars are 250px wide, so they occupy the same space. They will all run until the absolute bottom (point 0) of the page. That's just the way it goes. In OmniGraffle, the both have top and bottom paddings of 20px, and side paddings of 15px. We can get rid of the silly navigation items if we wish. Just remember that the sidebar goes all along the page, even after the content is done. That's what these sidebars do. The main content side is only 450px wide, which definitely will be complicated since it is smaller than the sidebar content, but that's actually the aesthetic I'm looking for. I want the content to begin 80px (100px max) down the page, so the header logo only has so much space to work with up there. We're going to go with 15px padding on the left and right and 20px on the top and bottom (like the sidebars) which means the content will sit nicely in that 450px div and all will be well. I know I'm designing for a wider screen, but really, who uses 800x600 anymore? If they do, they can scroll. . 31/08/06 - COMMENTS (0) Things I Still Need To Do There is a lot of functionality I still need to think through, and I also need to figure out how I'm going to archive or import my old site. I'm leaning towards just scraping every page and creating static pages for every post and just putting them up here so I don't have to worry about a Typepad import or anything, but it's something I need to think about. Before we can get going, I need to design the post page, the archives page, the about page (with contact box), the tour, and any other pages that need to be created in a Wordpress template (I don't know about these crazy kinds of things). Also, I need to figure out about live search, the rss scraping of my other blogs, and the possibility to do the flickr photo change and the short ends stuff. I mean, I'd love to do them, but if they're technically impossible, there's no point in keeping this design. Finally, I need to think through my "Film Bits" section and where that can be fit into this structure. Of course, that's a thought for another day. For now, let's sit tight with this. . 31/08/06 - COMMENTS (0) ------ SHORT ENDS Short ends is a mini blog post that will be no more than two or three lines long, so it doesn't deserve it's own full blog post in the main column. [31/08/06] It will be taking the place of my Daily Links, but will not use del.icio.us as each short end will be a post in itself, not a link and a description. [31/08/06] Each short end will have it's own archive entry, and the posts will be available by weekly or monthly archives, I haven't decided which one yet. [31/08/06] For a good example of short ends, see "the small" column on bluishorange.com. The only difference is that I won't allow comments on the short ends. [31/08/06] As you can tell, each short end is datestamped, and this date stamp is linked to the permalink of the short end for ease of bookmarking. [31/08/06] I'm not sure how this effect will be achieved, but I'm guessing it will involve some kind of plugin that will allow a separate mini-blog to operate within this sidebar column. [31/08/06] What it could also be is a category in my blog called Short Ends that is populated here and not in the main blog column. I'm not sure if that's possible, but it would make archiving and searching a lot easier. [31/08/06] In fact, that would be the ideal set up for me, so if you went to a monthly archive for my blog, you'd see the Short Ends interspersed between the feature posts, a little like Kottke's blog. [31/08/06] I really hope that kind of setup is possible, because I think it would be extremely beneficial for the longevity of the blog, and will also allow me to do something similar with the section I'm going to have called Film Bits. [31/08/06] So that's enough about Short Ends, I guess I'm only going to allow the ten most recent short ends to appear here in the sidebar, or things are just going to get way too long. If we're going to incorporate the short ends into the main blog for archiving, I won't need an archive link here at the bottom. Now let's just see if this is all feasible using the new build of Wordpress. [31/08/06] ------ ABOUT ARCHIVES PHOTOS SUBSCRIBE ON ELOQUATION: ¥ Most Recent Blog Post Title ¥ Next Most Recent Post Title ¥ Third Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fourth Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fifth Most Recent Post Title ON blogTO: ¥ Most Recent Blog Post Title ¥ Next Most Recent Post Title ¥ Third Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fourth Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fifth Most Recent Post Title ON BORROWING PRIVILEGES: ¥ Most Recent Blog Post Title ¥ Next Most Recent Post Title ¥ Third Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fourth Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fifth Most Recent Post Title ON QUALITY IS RELATIVE: ¥ Most Recent Blog Post Title ¥ Next Most Recent Post Title ¥ Third Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fourth Most Recent Post Title ¥ Fifth Most Recent Post Title ________________________________ You're visiting Eloquation.com. All content on this site is written by Sameer Vasta unless otherwise noted, and is licensed under this Creative Commons License. Feeling a little lost? Take a tour of my favorite content on this site, or just play around in the archives. If you still like me after all that, drop me an email and let me know. And if you really like it here, say thanks to Sai Krishna Satyanarayana for the site-setup and the template creation and for being such a cool guy. And of course, those awesome guys at Wordpress that made this CMS and my wonderful hosting providers Bluehost. Now stop reading this and start exploring!