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More format tweaks on scripting.com
By Dave Winer on Monday, October 10, 2011 at 11:56 AM.

I'm doing some more tinkering with the blog. #

1. On the home page, let's make it so that all the top level items are expanded by default. I don't see any benefit in having the previous days' posts collapsed. It doesn't matter which day they were posted on. This way you can just use the scrollbar to scroll through the recent pieces. You don't have to stop scrolling, and expand something, then resume scrolling. I'm sure no one was actually doing that.  #

A picture named elephant.gif2. Right now I have the right sidebar implemented as a float:right, which is perfect -- except for one thing. When you reach the end of it, the left part, the story text, wraps underneath it. Now the lines of the story text are too long. So somehow I have to make a column out of the left side. I did a lot of fussing with a lot of different approaches, and sorry folks, the one I like the best is a two-column table. I think the people who say tables shouldn't be used for layout are wrong. If you look at how you ahve to stand on your head to get a reasonable two-column layout any other way, well, I wish they would have just changed the names of table elements and let us have such a simple approach to layout. Or I could just use a table. Which is what I am going to do, now. Because I care more about pleasing readers than anyone else. (Though I don't like to admit it.) #

On the other hand, what if I put a div around the group of stories, and just say it's a fixed width. How about that? Maybe that would work. Would be even simpler than going to a two-column table. (Actually there already is a div around them, it's called scriptingHomePageBody.) #

Bing! That worked. So hopefully that solves the text-width problem. I'm sure some people hate the new font. I'm still playing with that. Have a look at Google Web Fonts to see if you can come up with a nicer serif font. Right now I'm using Cardo. #

3. A small change for people using the Scripting2 software. When we upload a picture, in the generated HTML, include a class="storyImage" on the img element. This allows us to style it from the stylesheet. If you don't have the style defined, it does no harm to have it there. (Actually I spoke too soon, I can't add the feature, you have to add it to your own template, at this location: scripting2Data.editor.prefs.watchedFolder.clipboardTemplate. I will change it for new users though.) #




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