my  block

where uzairs roam

Courtesy Kyle Neath, here’s Hemingway.

The simplicity of the design’s what really appeals to me. Or maybe it’s the darkness. Anyhoo, it’s pretty striking. I like it enough that I’ve decided I’m going to stick with it for the foreseeable future, and that means I might actually bother to customize it a bit. Like I said, I love it, but there are a few things I want to change:

1) Lopsided article layout: this is half-fixed already. When articles are of different lengths, the original Hemingway sticks in a lot of extra whitespace to make the lengths balance out. I’m currently truncating the article (and sanitizing any HTML so that I don’t get dangling tags), but that doesn’t solve the problem entirely. The issue is that any HTML embedded in the article may have layout implications (eg, <ul> tags), and all the extra linebreaks thus introduced make the truncation I’m doing useless — the articles still end up lop-sided. For an example, check out any of my workout articles. The proper solution would be to count the lines a rendered article takes up, which is next to impossible. So I’m thinking of alternatives.

2) Categories etc. under the pagefold: I think I’m going to put a minimal sidebar in. Not sure what it’s going to look like.

3) Most articles paginated away: you have to keep the number of articles on the front page at the bare minimum (in addition to truncating them), because otherwise it looks a little confused. Oh, and because then the categories etc. really get buried. Anyway, I think it might be nice to have articles appear sideways. That is, you’d click an arrow to see the next set of 4 (or whatever) articles, which would slide in from the right side of the screen. Sort of like a slideshow. I honestly don’t know if this would look good…

4) ‘About this entry’ is crap: I’m not sure — I like having it around, but the current content needs to be fixed. Trivial. Or should be, once I’ve thought about it.

Right, to bed. Once more: Kyle’s the man for this thing.