Monday, December 3, 2007

Reality is not What it Seems...

If you happened to be looking around the site at, say 9-pm-ish tonight, you may have noticed some strange goings-on. I've been playing about with the blog's template, doing my best to get some sort of expandability on my posts.

In trying to do this, I had some crazy things happen. I accidentally reset the page to the old, crappy, all-black template. Yuck. Then at various points in the process of adding code to the template, some text of mine was floating at the top of the page and/or at the bottom of each post. It's weird to look over old posts and see /* Added by Flavin */ on the bottom of each one. Especially since I thought that /* would comment sections out; I was wrong.

Anyway, everything's back to normal. Go about your business, reading as usual.

4 comments:

Flavin said...

Since I figure no one else will be reading this comment, this is for Ben. I was once again trying to figure out how to add a link at the bottom of long posts that would take you to the article's page, thus not having the whole huge article on the main page. Instructions for how to do that are here.

When I implemented this feature the first time, every post had the "Read more" link at the bottom, regardless of whether I wanted it there or not. Well, today I read through the instructions again to see if I had screwed something up, and I see this paragraph at the bottom:

Disadvantages: Requires changes to the posts themselves, rather than to the template only. However, the "read more" link is in the template, so it will appear regardless of whether a post has been truncated or not. (Modifying this feature is left as an exercise for the reader.)

That cheeky son of a bitch! I don't fucking know how to work with templates like that! That's why I'm reading the god damned instructions! If you know how to do what I want to do just fucking tell me how to do it!

Sorry. I was a bit upset about that. Later I guess I'll search for some instructions, but for now I've already wasted too much time.

Ben said...

(Modifying this feature is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I think that means he doesn't know how to do it either.

Flavin said...

Ben, this comment isn't even for you; it's for me.

I know I said I couldn't waste any more time on this, but I'm obsessive, so I did anyway. This comment is to preserve the links I found about solving the short-post-read-more problem so I can close my damned computer and study.

Forum post
Method 1
Method 2

Flavin said...

Dear Ben,

I implemented one of the methods I linked before. You can see it in action on my Lizzette Reynolds article. It says "Continue Reading...", but we can change that to whatever text we want.

Here's how you use it:

When you make a new article, there's some text in the template. Whatever you want before the "continue reading" should go before the <span id="fulltext"> and whatever you want in the full article should go between the <span id="fulltext"> and the </span>. If you don't need the "continue reading" link, just take the "span"s away and write as before.

There is one problem. If you go to the older posts by clicking on "Older" at the bottom of the main page, those all have "continue reading" links. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do about that.

Let me know if you like it or not. If you don't, it's still very easy to change back; I saved all the old files and such.