So I’ve got the blog category’s up and the Blog template is now working, so blog posts no longer show in the reading order template (which was totally confusing).
I’ve added the sub categories Updates, Reviews, and News. They’re now also in the sidebar to the right.
Also, the Author archive template is now active, though it doesn’t have a header yet. So, if you click Daniel‘s name on one of his reviews, for example, you can find a link to all his posts.
The one known issue is that for some reason pagination breaks down after the first page for these categories. I’ll work on fixing that tomorrow.
Also, you may/probably have noticed that the front page is no longer a list of book updates and blog posts. Something else will be there soon. Don’t worry, only good things.
Edit: Fixed a formatting issue that was causing the comments to get shifted off the layout to the left – happened because I changed a ol style to make the sidebar list look nicer without realizing it worked on the comments too. I made the style more specific and now it only effects the sidebar.
The page navigation is now in the bottom right of the page.
I’m not totally sure about how this looks right now, but something along these lines is needed if we’re going to have infinite scroll (otherwise it will be very easy to get lost in the huge list.) I’m still working on the infinite scroll, though, so stay tuned for that.
Also, Justice League Elite Volume 1 has been moved forward a few books.
In addition, 24 new character header images are now up, thanks to Daniel. These include Doctor Fate, Two-Face, Catwoman, and a host of others.
First of all, I tweaked the blog headers and author title text. The author now shows up right under the blog post title along with the time of the post. There is a small comment link there, and then a bigger one at the bottom of the post.
You may have noticed that the site has been pretty slow lately. Some of that has been from increase in traffic, which is natural, and some has been because we’ve been doing a lot of work in the backend. But apparently a huge chunk came from googlebot indexing as well – almost half a gig of traffic per day!
So I’m working now to figure out how to optimize the site for the most amount of content indexed for the least amount of bandwidth eaten up.
I’m also trying to speed up a few other things – the share links in the sidebar have been changed, for example. The individual site share links were each calling an outside site and holding up the loading of the sidebar. Changing it to just “addthis” has it call only one source instead of five or six.
I also removed the background image. I liked it, but I had put it in there on day one as a placeholder and forgot about it. I checked it today and it was almost 800kb! That’s almost one mb every time someone hits the page! Taking it out should make the site go a lot faster and help keep the bandwidth down. I’ll see what I can do for replacing it – probably a solid color.
I’m going to have to try and tighten up some code and optimize some other images as well.
It took a lot to make this site ready to become a multiple contributor website. Most of it you won’t see on the front end, though.
The first thing you might notice is that I put some User CP links in the upper right. This is mainly to make it easier for our contributors, but you can also benefit by registering. Right now it just means you can edit your own comments, make a profile, and the site will remember you – but there’s more coming for site users/subscribers, I promise!
Second, you may have noticed the author name is now a link. You can click that to see a little drop down bio of the author and a picture as uploaded to Gravatar. Mine has a temporary image of Metron from my forum profile. I may put a real picture of me in there later tonight if I remember.
There’s also a link to all the posts by that author in that little drop down. I’m working right now to switch all the book database entries to a different user (“Database Robot McRusty”, heh) so my count shows accurately and only lists blog posts instead of all the books as well. (there’s no real robotic or automated process, I just thought it was funny. I’m not sure what to call that fake user… it’s all me, really.)
That’s all I can think of for now. The rest of the updates are all hidden in the backend, but it took a good 8 hours of work (and the plugin count for this wordpress insanity is up to 35! Not counting the ones I’ve integrated or my own extensive hacks and re-designs. Blah! Probably pretty unstable. I’ll work on stability once everything else is working haha)
Pretty psyched!
