Making slow, but more, progress on the SOP design. I’m trying to get as much done possible before the big launch next week of the UNIMA Australia site, cause I know that will interfere with plans.

The majority of the home page has been finished ( http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/slam.php ), minus, of course, the url change. You can see I’ve put in a border around the recent posts/comments, etc. as well as added in links to popular posts. Thought that might come in handy. (Er, ignore the fact that there seems to be a missing link. It’s actually just that I’ve been fiddling around on a different page and a blog post doesn’t have a title. So it doesn’t show up in the list of course) I’ve also updated the sidebar, now with little icons to advertise that you can … advertise on the site.

For me, the best part is right at the bottom of the page. There was some extra room at the bottom of the page, but it looked a bit bare with nothing in place. I didn’t know what to add, another list of whatever seemed too big, but there’s not enough room for anything major. 

The good thing about the blog software is that you can call up different categories or blog pages as you choose; similar to how the recent posts/etc works. But what I didn’t know is that with the improved version of the software on SOP, you can add a widget that shows posts from another blog in random order. This is pretty neat, so I decided to use the functionality to create a randomly generated fact/quote. Every time you load the page, another one appears. (There’s only four at the moment, so your odds of getting the same one every time are pretty high) I like this idea, it’s sort of an easter egg meets fun facts. You’ll notice I took liberties with what the definition of ‘fun fact’ is if you see the randomly generated "Rygel is the anti-Yoda", which has been sitting in my head for a day or so. (Hey, he’s snobbish, greedy, selfish, and completely anti-Zen. But he looks like Yoda in many ways - green, slug-like, small, weird ears - so they sort of make a great yin-yang pair)

I’ve gotten kind of stuck today trying to fix up the links page, for which trying to get links to display in two or more columns is less than easy. In fact, so far it seems impossible. But amazingly enough, whilst testing out the links and seeing if I could call only ones tagged correctly, I’ve discovered that this version of the blog software also uses an automatic, automatically generated related posts based on the tags - which is pretty neat, because previously I’ve had to add in an extra plugin to do it.

But I’m having excellent luck starting on the videos page: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/videos.php

Using the avatar function across most of the pages, I took a screenshot of the Youtube video and added it to the page as a preview of the tutorial. Turns out to be a great idea, because now people can see what each video is about and be more encouraged to view it. I’ve even changed the ‘read more’ link, so that on the videos page it says ‘watch the video’. 

Each day I get a little bit closer to finishing, even though there’s a large - and growing - list of things that I’ve noticed and need to be fixed.  One thing I’m starting to wonder: should I create a separate Youtube channel just for the SOP stuff? Or should I just keep it on the PIM channel? Not sure, but at this point, that’s the least of my worries.

– Oh hey, if you have any fun facts or quotes or whatever, send ‘em my way! I want to add some more as time goes on.