If you check out the Preview Pages, you’ll find a new link.  This one demonstrates how the “Latest Stories” page is going to look.

On a similar note, there’s a reason that most of those say “Work in Progress”.  After looking at it several times, I’ve decided that the Story Listing page really needs some sort of background color thrown into the individual stories and category headings to set them off.  I’ll be experimenting with that at some point in the near future.

I’ve created the database organization for the Latest Releases page, so now I’m going to start digging through my old PHP files for what data type each table row should be.  I want to keep it minimized, even though this table will have a pretty finite size.  It’s never going to have more than 10 entries, because old ones are dropped when new ones are added.

Good practice for the future larger tables, though.

Once I’ve figured that out, I’ll probably load up a couple of rows with manual data and practice retrieving it with PHP pages.  It’s been a while, and I’m willing to bet that little operation will take some time for me to get right *laugh*

Once I can retrieve it with a test page, then I’ll practice writing it with yet another test page.  Then, once that’s working, I can actually write the admin interface to do it for real.

With any luck, I’ll have something to enter into it for real before too long.  I’m writing when I can, and things are moving.

As I said before — getting this working will be the major threshold for moving the website redesign forward.  This one widget will require nearly every sort of coding element that any other page will require.  I should have everything down pretty well by the time I finish this.

Okay, break time for a few.  Then I’m going to pop open a few files and see what’s striking me to write/edit.  I’m leaning toward editing the unpublished chapters of SOTM at the moment, getting them fully ready for posting…  Even if they won’t get posted for some time.  That takes less concentration than actually visualizing scenes, and thus is much easier to do with tornado boy awake and up to about F-3 level.