She’s changing the underlying theme, changing the artwork, changing (soon) the name of the site, though your old bookmark will still get you there—and has some new stuff up. She’s making progress on her book—I mean, we are rolling!
Go take a look. Link under the Closed Circle sites on the left sidebar.
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Hey, that’s looking spiffy. I like how it’s shaping up. I liked the old look too, esp. the color scheme. So far, it looks like she’s keeping some of the old ahd making some significant changes, with perhaps more to come. I like the new blog title too.
nice Nice NICE!
Like the way Jane’s matching up with the look already trialed in CC. Good to get cross-site imagery going … for a number a reasons. The ‘vibe’ off the growing identity does seem to encapsulate the CC trio. Would suggest that maybe CJ and Lynn also discretely use the cclogo as well. On this site (i.e. WWAS) it might go nicely on the right of the logoarea next to the ” post comments & search box” – pushing them to the left … and balancing CJs green logo that’s on the left. The black background of the cclogo might dominate though … maybe change that to white/transparent?
On Lynns Blog the cclogo would go quite well on the black hood. A quite contemporary look as I read that the current undergraduate fashion is to customise their hoodies with the university logo.
Thanks, guys. I was going to sneak that suggestion in on them. I can modify that “closed circle author” logo easily for all of us. I’m going to take it a step smaller on HotN. I like it at the top like that, but it’s a bit too dominant. Wasn’t sure how far I could take it down, but I can at least 50% it, I think. Then, it would fit in a sidebar or about anywhere.
Atahualpa has a nice ability to manipulate CSS from within the user modifications rather than getting into the actual CSS file. I’m just starting to appreciate how flexible it really is.
Do you notice any difference in the comparative load times? I do think Atahualpa is faster than Constructor.
BCS: I actually used the same colors as the old site and my background…which is the Eagle Nebula, has the same colors in it as the bubbles. I’m very fond of that type of color scheme. Originally, I was going to have it lighter…but then it just didn’t “feel” like mine. 😀
After a wild Saturday in which a theme-changer program intervened to reinsert, in the middle of the night and for NO sane reason anyone can figure out, color and type instructions from a previous theme, from a secret file it had retained, —and the carefully constructed and beautiful new page Jane had spent a week building met the morning log-on with inexplicable white patches and invisible sections of type—Jane battled through four or five complete reinstalls, nukes, go-to-defaults (which it ignored) and hand-entry of parameters (which it ignored) from 5am until midnight—until, lo, she located the culprit program, located the secret stash of wrong info, and fixed it. Welcome to our world……..
When auto-backup-and-restore goes horribly wrong…
Uhmm, that’s 23-5, uh… eighteen hours! of fighting. But it turned out worth it. It’s beautiful (except for the OBP I mentioned on her blog…). It does make me kinda glad I chose Joomla and not too many bells and whistles for my choir’s web site. I want to keep it simple so I can hand it off to someone else some day 😀 Then again, it really isn’t as attractive as Jane’s site.
Thanks! It wasn’t quite that bad…I had a couple of other family dragons to fight as a break! 😀 And we did put on some fun anime to buffer the maddening effects. 😀
I actually don’t have too many bells and whistles, and most of what I do have it pretty transparent. The culprit ended up being the very thing I put on to help me design the new site without interrupting the old! (theme Switch) Turns out it was hiding key information in the WP tables rather than confining it to the theme folders, so I could delete the folders all I wanted and never get rid of the corruption. Once I understood that, I could either work around it or ask Lynn to dig it out of the WP tables. Turned out to be a simple work around, once I understood, so opted for that. I’m really happy with the end result, and I did learn a LOT about manipulating the theme as a result, which is a good thing for future revamps of all the CC sites. (Carolyn had best beware…I might take on WWAS next. Bwahahaha!)
We started off trying Joomla! —fought it for half a year and gave up in despair. WP was actually much easier for us, but I guess that depends on what you need…and your willingness to take a template—turns out, not knowing Jack about Joomla! we were trying to learn the code, rather than taking its templates. By the time we got to WP, templates looked really good to us—and we chanced on some good ones.
Now, if Jane were like me, a smattering of art skillz and mostly black and white words-iz-fine sort of attitude, her life would be simpler, but mine would be duller–would you believe that my site, Closed Circle, Jane’s site, and Lynn’s all run off exactly the same template? It’s what you do next that matters. Start plugging in your own art, and paint the walls differently—we didn’t realize at the outset that the templates were the way to go.
You have my sympathy on the time spent pulling hair, cussing the machine, and tracking down what went wrong that made you lose valuable work.
I’m glad you got it back. — Surely there’s a way to save local copies?
Hmm, it seemed like a couple of the colors were different, but that might’ve been during while you were bug hunting…or it might be just my color perception, which has changed a little. (Gotta make an eye appt. in the near future.)
The past few days, I’ve been working on a few personal web things, graphics and what might eventually become themes for something. I’m making progress now learning SVG, but it’s sometimes slow going. I’ve run into a couple of things that will have to wait until I learn how to do them. Bummer. But the real bummer was getting ahead of myself, thinking, oh, I’ll just add this and script it. But nooo, the method I thought would work…isn’t working. I’ll have to find what’s wrong or what I’ve misunderstood (or missed) or I’ll have to go backwards and do it some other way. Still, overall, it’s been mostly fun and rewarding. I feel like I’m actually making progress. Slower than I’d like still, but progress.
I got a little novice gardener planting done this weekend, so I’m in hopes of at least tomatoes this spring and summer. Onions and basil also possible.
I’m about to call it a night and read or scribble (drawing or story ideas) before bed. Enjoy!
Oi…gardening! I’ve got to get out and clean up the dead stuff and feed for spring, but I’m going to leave it at that this year. Upkeep…not new stuff. (She chants, over and over.)
Sounds like you’re really serious about this! I just learn what I need to to achieve the effect I want. 😀
Don’t get the eyes checked on that account. 😉 I’ve been playing with the colors for three days trying to get just the balance I want and one that will work as well for those whose monitors are much different. I’ve got mine balanced very well now for accurate display to print, but the variation in monitors is still enormous.
Lynn does get a nightly backup of all the CC sites, and I do keep copies of the various versions of my modifications as I go along, but I still don’t for the life of me know what exactly caused this fallout of the black background for the header. When I started over, I went through the exact sequence by which I originally brought the site up…which was to copy the CC modifications exactly…and I still had the white background and border…so it’s something fundamentally affected in the WP tables.
The fix, OTOH, did NOT need to take so long. The embarrassing truth is that I’d have had the problem solved much sooner had I not put in a square instead of curly bracket into the CSS some time in the AM. I work with quite small type, and that slipped right past me. I wouldn’t have known that was what I did if I hadn’t copied the “add CSS” file into note pad. Once I knew what I’d done and tried the same code…it worked…and I went back and looked at that notepad file and found the culprit. Aw, well…. 😀
Eek, opening and closing pairs. :-/ Yup, anybody who codes has to chase those strays. Dang itty-bitty syntax errors. (Where in how many pages of code did I screw up and type (or not type) the wrong thing?)
CJ, Thanks for signing my books and taking the time to be so gracious. I look forward to the next ShejiCon….
Good to see you! Hope you have an easy week!
um – speaking of websites…
is shejidan down? I am getting a 404 error.
Apparently mysterious forces abound and have mucked with the link for Shejidan. I got there using http://forum.shejidan.net/ (with the final slash, but nothing following) They’re working on it at the moment.