A few big things are coming this way… I’ve completed the majority of design updates for Puppets in Melbourne - but I wouldn’t hold my breath on them never changing again, as I seem to be constantly redesigning. At least this time it wasn’t a redesign so much as a reworking of a previous one to include more colours and a move of the menu location.

Where I left off, I had just completed the home page, gallery, and about page. I’ve now finished off the rest: the policies page, contact page, and search. The blog page is 90% completed, and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As explained last time, the majority of work is simply updating the original design, and so there’s not much different about the above pages. The search page has an additional feature, which is a search box. Even though you can search from anywhere and the search page is technically ‘hidden’ (ie. not reachable through the menu), I find a lot of people click the submit button on the search form without actually inputting any text. This results in a blank search page and naturally, confuses people. So I’ve added the extra form just in case.

The blog page is my main struggle. As readers of School of Puppetry will have seen, I recently turned off comments there; and did it here at PIM as well. Why? Well, initially I thought it had been because I upgraded the PIM blog software (but not the SOP one) and thought I’d broken something in an updated skin file. But apparently with the new version of the blog, the form is using Ajax, a particular type of code which means no reloading of pages due to form submissions. That’s all well and good, but it didn’t work on my site: fortunately there is an option to use the old commenting system. Unfortunately, that refuses to work either. Scouring the error logs I discovered some odd errors and asked for help, but it seems like the error is not a usual one and it seems likely that commenting has been broken on both sites for the past 6 months. I just rarely get comments and didn’t notice the difference. (Which is a great lesson for running your own website: every so often you should test forms to see if they work) Even more unfortunate is that in trying to resurrect the commenting, is that in replacing edited files with originals ends up breaking and effectively defacing the contact page. Sigh…

Though commenting still needs to be fixed, the rest of the blog is functional. Again, most of it is merely adjusting colours and things, although I’ve made some minor changes to areas that were bugging me. No links on blog titles from a category page, which means you have to click on the ‘leave a comment’ link in order to view the blog post itself. That bugged me. Not having the category/tags/share button at the top of the post bugged me. The next/previous blog post overlapped if the text was too long; now fixed. I’ve re-added the related posts block at the bottom of each blog post, and added in a latest blog post block as well. Lastly, instead of having Twitter/Facebook/etc widgets at the footer of the blog, they’re now in the sidebar.

Scrolling past the list of categories and archive links you’ll now find a short selection of my latest tweets, a ‘like me on facebook’ widget, what I’m currently reading (hint: which will be relevant for future posts), a subscribe link for my Youtube account, and something fun…

A selection of my favourite shadow puppet videos found on Youtube. There’s some really great ones in there, including videos of wayang kulit and Chinese shadow puppets being made, some performances, and a wonderful ad produced on TV a while ago.

In between trying to solve the commenting issue, I will be working on a series of draft blog posts on a topic that will start Puppets in Melbourne down the road towards introducing the ‘new look’, and will get back into building. I have lots to do this year, and am already wondering how I’m going to work it all into a proper schedule.