I haven't been quite daring enough for my own liking while working on this current version of my site. For a time, I had implemented prototypes of accessibility measures — accesskeys, skip links, navigation links and the like — and it just felt so boring. Why did I keep working on these and perfecting these instead of going a little further?
The answers lies within two things: 1) what I thought were limitations within Movable Type, and 2) my fanaticism with making something pretty that still had a nice clean core. My next layout, hopefully, will feature the full functionality of Movable Type, and at the same time, glow with pink and yellow (ha! it's not that drastic) radiance via the implementation of nested categories and article taglines, among many other things (linklists, better footnotes, and more!).
Nested categories
Most blogging services of our era come packaged with the ability to categorize posts — primarily for the sake of archives — so organization via categories isn't anything new or innovative. It simply creates a catch-all for posts of a similar nature — a taxonomy system of an earlier era. Now that tag clouds are far [Thank you, Rohit] more popular than categorization methods — in the sense that giving a viewer any idea about what might be within a certain category of posts — nested categories (subcategories to some) may seem tossed on the wayside of the classification system. But their potential is being vastly underestimated.
The execution of this classification method depends on the type of post and the category it is already placed in. My old category system was very loose. Categories such as "Euphonics" and "Politications" fell into the giant abyss of "Commentary". Therefore, I had to make a move towards fewer categories...and more nested categories that would not be mechanisms for archiving.
Think of it as a new take on the tagging system. Instead of adding tags to certain things, you toss it into a category of similar things in a larger category. The larger category is the only thing that will show, but say, if you wished to read more reviews (within General), you wouldn't have to worry about a confusing variety of tags to take you to the posts you wanted to read. Taxonomy without the tags. I'm loving it.
(Having said this, it must be noted that I'm fiercely anti-tags for reasons unbeknownst to me. Maybe I will figure this out soon.)
Design implementation was above all the most difficult part of this thinking process. There is no official "category" icon that people can instantly associate with the term. However, there are many icons (folders, flags, related icons) that can be only loosely interpreted as category icons. Most importantly, icons cannot be meaningless. It doesn't matter how pretty an icon looks; an icon is nothing more than a visual crutch to accent the meaning of the content it is placed by. Recent Adobe icon releases have spurred copious amounts of ire because the two letter mnemonic is difficult for many people to understand right away. But when has Adobe ever had clear icons? They've had pretty ones, certainly, and these are pretty as well. I personally like them, and while I don't feel that they're very good icons, the large blocks of color stand out very well on my silly Windows desktop. Not to mention that I don't really give the icon much thought, as I'll go on to explain.
The real clue, for your avid reader, is the link beside the icon. I decided to focus on that link and a relation with the more important link to the main category. I decided to use the word "via", which to me, indicates both forward motion and a sort of...dropping down. To come to a category via another category implies that the post would have passed through one category and fallen into another, still with the presence of the old, but in this giant catch-all of the new. Never mind that it means road in Latin! Now that that was settled, I had to think about how exactly to implement the category links. Parentheses around the link (via Reveries) felt as if the nested category was little more than a thought, a glance in the wrong direction. Oh, wrong indeed! I tried a variety of ASCII arrows and lines before finally settling with...oh, come now! You should have known!
The em dash
In my stories, I always use the em dash to add an additional thought, branching off one idea and going into another. Branching! Yes! Good! Much better than showing directions. Now, we are clearly stemming from Reveries into General, and ending up in General. But we came via Reveries, did we not? Of course. Case closed; and time to move into the cozy realm of article taglines.
Article taglines
If possible, the tagline of "Article taglines" would be "When songs don't say enough...". Woeful. Wistful. Downright true. For the past few years, I have used words within songs (related to my posts) for my titles, intermittently. I mean...for techy or design topics, it's hard to pick a song that relates (CSS IN THE SPRINGTIME, WOOO WOO WOOO). But my Commentary category has a surplus of such titles. The problem is, songs convey different things to different people. So how do you tell people the exact meaning of your post's title without confusing them?
Easy and almost incorrectly implemented taglines, that's how!
By creating a class (.tagline) and applying it to the <$MTEntryExcerpt$> property, I can easily assign a tagline to entries that require them. In the event that an article doesn't require a tagline, the tag should not display because the field is blank. The only ripple effect would be within article searches, where the excerpt normally appears. To counter this, the tagline should be informative enough to help searching efforts and describe the article title. Excerpts within searching templates will not be styled.
I'm not quite sure that it's correct to be using the <$MTEntryExcerpt$> for this purpose, but I think it's actually going to work in my favor. The tagline, after all, will have to help describe the article...a shortened excerpt, if you will. As long as Movable Type doesn't eat me, I'll be fine. I have a lot of system cleaning to do before the layout is put into place.
That's all for now! More articles will come as my redesign nears completion.
Read 2 comments (Leave a comment?)
Rohit said:
First of all did you actually mean “..Now that tag clouds are farm more popular than…”
And I hate the new Adobe icons. I miss the pretty ones! Hmm I wonder if I can do all these things in wordpress. Have you ever used wordpress ?
Posted on December 24, 2006 10:31 PM; Permalink
Ranjani said:
Whoops, no! That will be fixed quite shortly. I wrote this late at night, and finished it early in the morning - two times of day where I can’t exactly concentrate on things.
Well, the new Adobe icons are fresh. I disliked them at first because they don’t display any characteristic charm that the programs offer. But it’s an innovation, and that’s what Adobe’s good at. There’s been a lot of fuss on the old Macromedia icons as well..and I have to say, I loved those too. These icons are by the same team.
Yep, I’ve used WordPress on and off. I’m pretty sure you can do all that and more. WordPress has more template flexibility, and Movable Type has more tag flexibility. However, WordPress is infinitely less complicated, from my experience.
Posted on December 24, 2006 11:41 PM; Permalink