kitchen table math, the sequel: formatting and sidebar

Thursday, January 11, 2007

formatting and sidebar

Catherine asked me to look into adding a sidebar. I tweaked a format and came up with this.

Its pretty close to this, but not exact. Any inputs?

Update: Spanned header across page, so not sidebar title is even with date of top post.

25 comments:

Catherine Johnson said...

kitchen table revolution?

Catherine Johnson said...

wow!

That's pretty cool!

Can you tweak it?

Pull the Contributors line down even with...the first date??

(I'm obsessive about this stuff. I like a page to "hit you" - to have lots of "graphic oomph," if you know what I mean...)

That's why I like black & white.

The blue is MUCH better. You can tell what the links are now.

cool!

Catherine Johnson said...

I'm interested to know what people think about the font.

Serif typeface is easier to read on paper, but people don't seem to use it often online.

I should check Jakob Nielsen.

Ben Calvin said...

For whatever reason, Serif doesn't read as well on screen to me. Every pixel is precious.

What about the Haloscan widget on the sidebar that was discussed earlier. Are you going to do that?

TurbineGuy said...

All the widgets can be added easily. The kitchentablerevolution was just a temp blog. I can easily be migrated to this one and the widgets added like normal.

The fonts can be customized easily...

I will see about lowering the contributors line.

Catherine Johnson said...

YES!

Thanks for reminding me!

We definitely need the Haloscan sidebar.

Ken says it's easy to install.

KDeRosa said...

actually, I've soured on the haloscan comments. I like the blogger comments better and there is recent comments widget available here.

Barry Garelick said...

I've been feeling rather sans serif myself lately, so I'll vote for that type of font.

Catherine Johnson said...

Ken - thanks!

Why aren't you liking Haloscan?

Catherine Johnson said...

Just quickly looking around the web, it sounds like sans serif should be the plan.

TurbineGuy said...

Ok... all this talk about fonts.

Any possible way of choosing one of these:

Arial Courier
Georgia Times
Trebuchet Verdana

If so, then they can be customized at whim with the blogger template settings.

TurbineGuy said...

I might be wrong, but basically because blogger uses xml and widgets, its not going to be possible.

Catherine Johnson said...

This may be too complicated, but why do "widgets" make html impossible?

(If this is too complicated to answer without eating up your day, don't bother.)

KDeRosa said...

The biggest reason I didn't like Haloscan was because it was no better than the new blogger comments. Plus Blogger has the advantage of:

1. Playing along nicely with firefox

2. More easily integrating with the original post. Both can be displayed on the same archive page without resorting to frames.

Other than that it was a toss=up pnce I found a recent comment widget for blogger commments.

KDeRosa said...

You also might want to consider using blogrolling for the link list. When it's working right, you can see which blogs on the list have been updated recently.

Unknown said...

Looks fine, but I like the larger font here (hint, hint).

Unknown said...

And don't get me started on Nielsen.

LynnG said...

And just when I was starting to figure out twiki text formatting. . .

Can anyone give me links to learn simple html tags? And how do we post URLs in the comments. I noticed that it's very easy to do in the original post. But how do you do it in the comments? Especially if the URL is really long, blogger just seems to chop off the end of the link.

TurbineGuy said...

The font size can be easily customized with a click of a button on new bloggers layout changes, as can font colors, link colors, date colors, etc...

The new blogger templates uses "variables" which blogger recognizes do allow quick editing.

Now if I can get Catherine to send me her template so I can edit it and get her to reload it.

p.s. the font is bigger already.

TurbineGuy said...

to post a link in comments the format is like this.

Note: replace "[" with "<" and "]" with ">" when doing it yourself.

You type [a href="http://yourlinkhere.com]your link[/a]

it looks like this...

You type your link

Unknown said...

"I like the blogger comments better"

No trackbacks. Haloscan has trackbacks.

Catherine Johnson said...

rightwingprof

Hey!

I WANT to get you started on Nielsen!

Nielsen being the only usability guy I know (well, him and Krug), I'm all ears.

Catherine Johnson said...

WHAT ARE TRACKBACKS???

I HAVE NEVER GOTTEN TRACKBACKS!!

ok, I have to check out Ken's comments.

Good idea about using blogrolling.

Unfortunately, I don't know what blogrolling is.

Catherine Johnson said...

There's something liberating about having no idea what you're doing, I find.

KDeRosa said...

No trackbacks. Haloscan has trackbacks.

The new blogger has those too (and now they actually work).

They're called "links" and a link to the links can be placed right next to the comments.

Even links from non-blogger blod show up.