I did a little more writing on Lowborn and initial work on restructuring Barren Harvest, but this post is mainly to announce a new preview page.

I replaced the old Filtered Homepage preview with the new Story Listings preview.  Didn’t make much sense for that old preview to be up there when the much more advanced guest filtering page is up.

The new preview gives you an idea of what a listing of stories will eventually look like.  I’m still tweaking it a bit, but this is the general form.  It also demonstrates a lot of CSS work, creating new layouts with the same basic style as the main page.

This is just the final listing page.  There will be a selection page before that which will let you view stories as Dark or Les, as well as other narrow options such as stories in my fantasy world, Laresa stories, LST3Ks, The core storyline of Danica/SOTM, etc.

Just wanted to get the general layout done so that I have something to build into when I start writing the code.  The story listings are one of the pages that I’ll generate dynamically with PHP.  That way, all I ever have to do to update them is add new categories/stories from an admin interface, and they’ll automatically come up as soon as I click the submit button.

Also gives greater flexibility for what stories to display for anyone visiting the site.

I can pretty much generate any type of page that I need to with CSS now, I believe.  They should all stay mostly confined to the upper quadrant of the page as the existing pages do, as well.  Thanks to the inline abilities of CSS, I can just scroll individual sections, leaving menu bars on screen rather than scrolled away at the top or bottom.  Should be much easier to navigate.

The hard part will come once I start fully integrating the PHP and content in actual pages.  I’ll have to go through and tweak things for load times and server strain.  Fortunately, I shouldn’t need the WordPress front-end except on the index/home page.  I’m not going to display that blog blurb anywhere except there.

To grab the settings for filters, I will need to call up the forum front-end on every page, though.  I may not actually access it, because I’m going to carry the settings through the pages in much the same way as I do for guest filtering, but the front-end will still need a call, just in case the settings are lost by leaving the main string of website pages.

Then again, I might just write a less intensive call of my own that only grabs the data that I need, and not all of the stuff that I don’t in the forum front-end.  All depends on how much time and motivation that I have.

At least one of the hard parts of this whole process is pretty much done.  I knew exactly jack about CSS before I started this project, and I think I have it down well enough to do what I need to do.  I’ll probably expand that knowledge at some point in the future and fine-tune it to make everything work more efficiently.  I’m pretty sure that I’m doing a lot of things the hard way right now, eating more server ticks/storage space than necessary.

I probably won’t start any hardcore coding in PHP until I have time to boot up the old computer and retrieve my folder of PHP programming stuff from it.  The user side of the site won’t be all that difficult to do.  Most of that is simple retrieve → display stuff.  The hard part will be on the back-end that nobody but me will ever see.

Okay, time to see if I can’t get a little more writing done on Lowborn.