Kei-ni hashinsuru!
I was wondering whether or not to have a completely new banner (no prizes for guessing who would've been featured) to go with the new theme but I'm a rather sentimental sort of person. Lunamaria's the character that pulled me into animeblogging while Stripey's nagging persuasion and fine example gave that extra push. In addition, the making of the old banner itself means a lot to me - it was a wonderfully warm welcome to have the original art and banner design so generously provided by two great luminaries of the community respectively.
In any case, being a humanities student without any training in computers, this post is to record some personal idiot-proof notes about the modifications in case I have to revisit them in the future.
Header image. I still can't download the plugin from Hasse Ramlev's site. When I try to "Save link as...", the zip file can't be extracted and just turns out to be a php file containing the code for the download page itself. Fortunately the css method wasn't too difficult, thanks to this great walk through.
Page Width. I referred to Paul Stamatiou's entry to make the adjustment of 780px to 826px because the 2 x 250px pics with padding were coming out in awful single vertical rows. Mr Stamatiou's post didn't mention this (maybe it's obvious but it's not obvious to css/code-illiterates like me) but the percentage width of the "secondary" class which governs the sidebar's width also had to be adjusted downwards to prevent the expanded left column from kicking the sidebar (right column) down to the bottom of the page after I upped it from 500px to 538px.
Comments. Initially tried to fit the Get Recent Comments code into the sidebar template but saw that there was some default code for a "blc_latest_comments" function. A Google search turned up Brian Meidell's plugin and other than being glad not to have to fiddle with the code, I really like the functionality of the BLC plugin.
Meta. Also finally realized that the login/out at the bottom of the sidebar was actually there in the theme but had been commented out. Uncommented that first line so no more location bar or bookmarking needed to get in but the XHTML, XFN and wp links stay commented - I am indeed one of those 99% of the people who don't use those links.
I'm sure Yuki would have solved all of this and more in a flash. Sooner or later, there'll be a YUKI.N> theme and it *will* be moé.
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July 14th, 2006 - 03:50
If you download the latest subversion repository version of K2, it should have the banner thing built in.
http://zeo.unic.net.my/k2/
Other than that, welcome to the hive mind of K2!
July 14th, 2006 - 03:57
My favourite change would the ‘latest comments’ section. It had always been one of my favourite features when I read Sea Slugs and Riuva( although Riuva gets less points for needing to scroll down to see their ‘latest comments’ section). Latest comments sorted by date and section is win.
Latest comments sorted solely by date, such as that on AoMM is also good, but present problems when there is high traffic, since it will push down comments way too fast( given a default value of last ten comments).
No latest comments at all is annoying, since I have to manually check each entry to see if there is anything new, and if somebody posts in an old post… Well… good luck to him/her getting a response.
You never know when somebody might post something new in an old entry. Of course… chances are high that most of them will be raving loonies posting incoherent babble, but gems do pop up now and then, from what I have experienced at Sea Slugs.
Cheers.
July 14th, 2006 - 04:07
Zyl, if you need me to re-do the banner with your current color theme drop me a line. Alternatively I can try to pull something out of my arse and do a new Luna-oriented banner if you would like. I’ll see if I have time this weekend to do so. I just need the original image again… somehow… hehe.
July 14th, 2006 - 07:30
heh all i can say is……. suge!!!!! YUKI FTW!!!!!
too bad doing it by typing out 100 lines of code is soooo ” MA FAN”
Ps: in malaysia for work related stuff……
July 14th, 2006 - 11:02
Hung, thanks. Besides being sentimental, I’m also risk averse. LOL Using betas already test my nerves somewhat and nightlies is beyond the bounds of my consideration. The rotating banner feature also looks groovy even though I’m a faithful one-banner man.
Skane, conversely it’s because I am fortunate to have many commenters coming to grace my blog which makes Latest Comments type plugins useful for blog management. Mysteriously, sometimes these plugins are better at ignoring spam than the anti-spam plugins sometimes. There have been a few times in the past when I’ve logged in to see spam comments that got through and listed in the recent comments section of the wp dashboard but there’s nowhere to be seen under the GLC plugin!
moyism, yeeessss plz!!! Mail has been sent.
Leif V, RAWR RAWR YUKI YUKI LOVE!!
July 14th, 2006 - 14:35
RAWR RAWR YUKI LOVE!
Skane, good advice. But sidebar space is at a premium.. It seems my sidebar’s getting longer and longer so I have no choice. I have super strong index finger muscles from the scrolling already. My layout’s been static for months.
I was supposed to be doing one new banner a week and putting it in a rotation but that would mean longer loading time I think.
Zyl: good idea to have this post. And I was a hard science student, so that doesn’t make me any better at this evil internet shit. I always forget what I did and have to relearn, everytime I fiddle with my layout.
And the world is K2 eh?
July 24th, 2006 - 22:21
Thanks, moy, for the luuuurvely lurvely new banner!!
July 25th, 2006 - 16:24
New banner looks AWESOME.