Thursday, February 23, 2006
Re-thinking Articles
Dynamic Dropdowns
I haven't written in a while, but I have made some developments. The Who's Your Neighbour
is coming along. I have the javascript working pretty well at taking the selected city and
pulling in the neighbourhoods associated with those cities. In implementing this on the
client side I have established that I need to associate neighbourhoods to cities on the
physical model side. I had thought that I would use coordinates to associate things together
but it would just be too complicated to do that using javascript. I will simply require
that people select a city when they add a neighbourhood. I have also figured out a way to easily drop the links and ads space at the sides when a form appears. I think this adds to the usability
of the form.
Articles
On the article content side I have made some progress. I have an article on the bungalow
about 70% finished. The article started out titled The Craftsman Bungalow, but I began by
talking about the social aspect of the Bungalows popularity. By the time I had barely coverd
that area I already had a sizeable article by web standards. So I then renamed the article
Bungalow Mania, and have decided that I will treat the bungalow in three articles.
Bungalow Mania to cover the social aspect, The Arts and Crafts Movement, to cover
the origins of the bungalow, and The Crafstman Bungalow to cover the features of
a early 20th century bungalow. In each article I will need to be clear that I am discussing
a different kind of bungalow that many of us grew up in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
I think that I will need to take this multiple article approach for most articles. Rather
than trying to write one far reaching article that no one would ever finish reading on
a web page, I will break them down into smaller articles. This has the benefit of being
better for the reader, but also will allow me to write content more quickly if I do it
in smaller chunks. I will make sure that I link between articles carefully and always
provide a list of related articles.
I am still trying to decide whether I need to finish the house styles descriptions first
or whether I should write the articles, as I learn a lot about the styles as I research
and write the articles.
Well I got to get back to finishing Bungalow Mania.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action List:
To Do
- Test image manipulation with Java
- Test image storage in MySQL
- Look into logic to rotate articles
- Test use of blogger for articles
In progress
- Create What style is my house questionnaire? - roughed out on paper
- Create House Style section - in progress
- Write my first article and work out subsections and format - Started Post war homes
- Complete profile form - looking at blogger format
Complete
- Created no-sides style sheet to drop conten at edges
- broke style sheets into separate sheets
- Took care of printer friendliness
- Research post war homes - Done
- Create front page centre content - Done
- Test out compiled page technology - Done
- Create a mini icon for browsers - Done
I haven't written in a while, but I have made some developments. The Who's Your Neighbour
is coming along. I have the javascript working pretty well at taking the selected city and
pulling in the neighbourhoods associated with those cities. In implementing this on the
client side I have established that I need to associate neighbourhoods to cities on the
physical model side. I had thought that I would use coordinates to associate things together
but it would just be too complicated to do that using javascript. I will simply require
that people select a city when they add a neighbourhood. I have also figured out a way to easily drop the links and ads space at the sides when a form appears. I think this adds to the usability
of the form.
Articles
On the article content side I have made some progress. I have an article on the bungalow
about 70% finished. The article started out titled The Craftsman Bungalow, but I began by
talking about the social aspect of the Bungalows popularity. By the time I had barely coverd
that area I already had a sizeable article by web standards. So I then renamed the article
Bungalow Mania, and have decided that I will treat the bungalow in three articles.
Bungalow Mania to cover the social aspect, The Arts and Crafts Movement, to cover
the origins of the bungalow, and The Crafstman Bungalow to cover the features of
a early 20th century bungalow. In each article I will need to be clear that I am discussing
a different kind of bungalow that many of us grew up in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
I think that I will need to take this multiple article approach for most articles. Rather
than trying to write one far reaching article that no one would ever finish reading on
a web page, I will break them down into smaller articles. This has the benefit of being
better for the reader, but also will allow me to write content more quickly if I do it
in smaller chunks. I will make sure that I link between articles carefully and always
provide a list of related articles.
I am still trying to decide whether I need to finish the house styles descriptions first
or whether I should write the articles, as I learn a lot about the styles as I research
and write the articles.
Well I got to get back to finishing Bungalow Mania.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action List:
To Do
- Test image manipulation with Java
- Test image storage in MySQL
- Look into logic to rotate articles
- Test use of blogger for articles
In progress
- Create What style is my house questionnaire? - roughed out on paper
- Create House Style section - in progress
- Write my first article and work out subsections and format - Started Post war homes
- Complete profile form - looking at blogger format
Complete
- Created no-sides style sheet to drop conten at edges
- broke style sheets into separate sheets
- Took care of printer friendliness
- Research post war homes - Done
- Create front page centre content - Done
- Test out compiled page technology - Done
- Create a mini icon for browsers - Done
# posted by Brian R. Booth @ 7:46 AM 
