EVula's Blog

Welcome to the new Lair!

It's finally here: the redesigned Lair. Faster. Stronger. Better.

Go ahead, take a look around. The first thing you'll notice is that there's no longer any border around everything; there's an image at the top to let you know where you are (among other things; more on that later), the standard sidebar navigation on the left, and everything in the middle.

The next thing you might notice is the right column. Yes, ads have managed to sneak their way onto evula.com. It sucks, I know, but I'd like to eventually start making less negative money on the site. Right now, I'm going to stick with plain text ads, as they are the least obtrusive, and there's no chance for obnoxious Flash or animated banners. Keep in mind that, no matter what, I will *NOT* have pop-up or pop-under ads; not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Hates them we do.

Something that *is* cool about the Google ads, though, is the fact that they are pseudo-intelligent when it comes to their size; lengthy pages have more ads on them than short pages. I also had to cheat a bit to make the ads "fit" on each page when it comes to the color scheme; it's not perfect, but I don't have a lot of control over it. Trust me, it's much better than the options they had.

The Reviews are the section that have the most dramatic change. Each Review (as well as the Rants and gaming articles) has a Review Information table off to the right of the content. This has everything you could need about the Review itself; the author, the date posted, the rating, purchasing information, etc. I'm pleased as punch about how it's turned out, and I'm planning on using that table for other features down the road; anything else on that will have to be summed up with a .

In addition to the visual change, there's a lot going on under the hood that you might not even notice. For example, it is now a lot easier to get around evula.com, using a nifty little feature called accesskey values. Each of the content headings (Games, Humor, Opinions) is numbered, starting with 1 for Games (if you hover over the link, you'll see what number it is pop up). In Safari, you can activate these by hitting control and the number (ie: Games is control-1). To get to the top of whatever section you're at, you can always hit control-9. Hit control-0 to get to the Lair's front page.

Also filed in the "happening under the hood" folder is the fact that the Lair now uses 100% valid XHTML and CSS. If you have serious trust issues, there are links at the bottom of the left navigation area that will validate wherever you are. The nice thing about the valid code is that it lets me shrink the markup significantly, letting pages download faster. I also structured the Lair a lot better so that search engines can get what they need quickly and easily.

The Contact Info page also got a major overhaul; now everything is run off of a single PHP include. When I mean everything, I also mean the Rants and Reviews; if I change a person's information in that one file, it changes everywhere. This is quite an improvement over the old system, and more importantly, it makes life easier for me. :)

From here on out, I'm going to start getting a lot better about date-stamping everything that goes up on the Lair. As a result, all of the Rants and Reviews have a "date added" value in their Information tables. This will be true for the jokes, as well.

I sort of went hog wild with adding meta and link tags; a quick peek at the source code will show what I mean. Some of the stuff may not even matter, but at the same time, the vast majority of it is generated automatically by whatever page you access, so it doesn't matter! :)

Some of the stuff that is new today is just your average, run-of-the-mill new content. For starters, there are three new Reviews (Hitchhiker's Guide, Republic Commando, and UT2k4) and one new Rant (George Lucas Rant). The bulk of the new content, however, is in the Quote Archive; it went from 288 quotes to 600, more than doubling the content there. Hot damn. :)

Now, it isn't perfect. For starters, I couldn't get the damn random text script that powers the Store Spotlight section to work in the two minutes I had, so right now it's just showcasing a single product (what pisses me off about that is I went ahead with all the trouble of recreating the fifty images that are swapped out). Same with the Random Quote feature that I used to have on the front page, although that is also a style sheet issue as well.

One of the things I had hoped to have finished was a varying ICRA rating meta tag that changed depending on what page you are on. It doesn't matter very much for most pages, but it would have come into play on stuff like the Rants (which is why there is a rating for each) and, later down the road, the jokes in the Joke Archive. Oh well, one of the things I learned from my failure with getting it working will come in handy when I redo it; I just didn't have time to take care of it for today.

Something else that people may notice: there are plenty of references to the Forums, in the form of links to the Update Log (on the front page) and prominent "discuss this whatever" links for Rants and Reviews, even though the Forums have been dead for half a year. They are still there because, eventually, the Forums will be recreated and I didn't want to disassemble parts of the layout just to put it back together down the road.

I'll have another update in a couple of weeks, where I'll be fixing some of the smaller, nagging issues, as well as adding any more new content that comes my way. I'll also be updating sections as I convert them.

If you see any issues (broken links, funky formatting, whatever), be sure to let me know (either reply here, or email me, or catch me on iChat) so that I can get it taken care of. Likewise, If you have any suggestions, run it by me; I might like it, or I might already have something in mind, but it never hurts to try.

Posted by Eric at June 6, 2005 11:47 PM