Changed the post count on reading order pages to 100, which seems to minimize the chances of that strange error popping up. Still got it once in 50 pages or so, but that’s a lot less than before. Will have to figure out a better permanent situation (maybe that infinite scroll thing). Seems to work for now. Added next and last links to the top and bottom of these pages, since you kind of need them now to navigate.

Also fixed the book count up top in the header (it was including blog posts as titles in the database) and added a counter for the amount of tagged characters that you can sort by.

In addition, moved the code that calls the sidebars to header.php so they get called before the content – meaning that the navigation pops up quicker (or should seem to not move at all) and isn’t dependent on the rest of the content loading right away. Should make the user experience the tiniest bit slicker.

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I’ve been having some strange adventures of myself, just with this webdesign stuff. For example, I’ve started getting a very strange error:

Content Encoding Error

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

*   Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

It never seems to happen on the newly redesigned front page, and seems to happen on the larger lists (like the full recommended reading order) with much more frequency than it happens anywhere else. I’ve tested it on several computers and some people on the wordpress forum see the same error. But no one has been able to advise me on exactly why it’s happening. I tried limited the post count and it still happened periodically. I’m looking into it, but it’s pretty frustrating. Let me know if any of you are experiencing the same problem (And where!)

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The front page doesn’t display all the blog posts at once anymore, it’s been fixed to display the 5 most recent posts.

The next page/previous page links now work as well. I tweaked the formatting on those links a little bit.

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You should be able to get updates on almost any platform now! Simply click on the RSS aggregator icon on the top of the first sidebar, in the address bar, or through your feed reader and wait for updates. Alternatively, you can drop your email in the box up there and click subscribe!

I added comment, email, digg, facebook, and del.icio.us links to the bottom of the fed posts. Not sure if there’s anything else people might find useful, honestly the only share I use is the button in Google Reader. Let me know if there’s a service you really really really want added there and I’ll think about it.

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Been working pretty hard on figuring out some front page and other design stuff. What you see is sort of where I’m at right now.

Basically, I want to the front page to show the last five most recently edited items (books that I’ve added tags and pictures to, or in the long run, new books added to the database) and then the blog posts. Images are working for these, though I’d say both images are considered placeholders for now. I added little one pixel borders to this stuff as well… padding here and there, cleaned up some unseen code, etc.

Had to change the code for the images grabbed during the elseif loops because the border didn’t work on “object” tags, plus the “object” tags didn’t really work at all in internet explorer, since they were nested – the point was to display a placeholder image if, for example, the “character-name”.jpg (an automatically searched for image) was not found.

So for now the images will just be blank on the list and series pages till I fill them all in, since I’m just going to use regular “img” tags for those (there are few enough that I can see accomplishing that quick enough – for all 1000 whatever characters though? I’ll have to figure out some kind of placeholder script, though it would be cool if I can actually put up an image of every one.)

In other news, today I calculated that I’ve been spending roughly 35 hours a week on this project. Seems I got myself a second full time job and didn’t notice.

Edit: Just figured out why the posts were not displaying in order of most recently edited on the front page – somehow an extra query_posts snuck past me. I must be tired. I combined the two (the second one was just to subtract the news/blog category from the displayed posts) and it works, all hunky dory!

In celebration, I think I’ll go update a few books so they show up there.

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