A Year With the Contempo Template...
In 2017, the first change I made was to disable the featured post feature as in the case of my content, since the cover art that I use is not high resolution, the featured post image often appeared fuzzy. Among the other changes over the past year, were the addition of eight new gadgets which are explained briefly in this post and in greater detail in separate posts:
- Contempo in a Two-Column Format
- Pretty Dates for Contempo
- Display Newer Post Links in Contempo
- Provide the Missing Hamburger for Contempo
- Popular Posts in a Compact Format
- Random Posts in a Compact Format
- Surviving the Move from Post to Snippet
- Linking Snippet Text to Posts
The Contempo template presents posts as a series of snippets and originally, the snippets were presented one per row. What I wanted was a way to display more snippets in less space. At one point, I had managed to do most of the heavy lifting using a complicated style sheet, but, the CSS proved to be a bit flaky and occasionally, a post snippet would either disappear or would be misaligned in some horribly noticeable way. So, I created a gadget to display Contempo in a Two-Column Format. The character art for this segment is Junko Enoshima from Danganronpa.
After the dust settled following the release of the new Blogger templates, I took the opportunity to consider making some improvements to my site. I had seen some pretty dates on other sites and I thought that I might want to look into this for my own site. With Blogger, you have some control over the general format of the dates on your site, but, in the end the dates are just plain, boring text. So, after some research and a bit of coding, I came up with a mechanism to make Pretty Dates for Contempo. The character art for this segment is Vocaloid Hatsune Miku.
A few months after the launch of the new templates, it became clear that there were some issues with the navigation. The new themes allow one to navigate to older posts and to the home page, but, once you've moved past the first few pages of post snippets, there is no way to get back to a previous set of post snippets, except by returning to the home page and navigating through the older post snippets again. This would be fine if there were only a few posts, but, since I have hundreds of posts, this was a concern. I came up with a solution to Display Newer Post Links in Contempo. By the way, in case you were wondering, the character art for this segment is a modified version of the "more deban" aka "more screen time" illustration that originally appeared on the back cover of the tenth manga volume of Sword Art Online.
When Blogger rolled out new templates last year, the navigation scheme for the new templates was a bit different. Those of us who happened to have the screen width set below a given width, discovered that the sidebar menu was not visible on the home page unless you selected a "hamburger" icon on the top-left corner of the page. And, if you navigated to a post, the hamburger icon disappeared entirely, so, those of us with screen widths below a given width could not access the sidebar menu at all from post pages. I came up with a gadget to Provide the Missing Hamburger for Contempo. The character art for this segment is Mimi Pearlbaten from Re:Zero.
The popular posts gadget is a new feature of the Contempo template which displays a handful of snippets for the most popular posts. For the popular posts, I didn't necessarily want full blown snippets, but, rather just a handful of links. So, I adapted a custom Related Posts gadget to create a gadget for Popular Posts in a Compact Format. The character art for the related posts article is the Internet Explorer mascot, Inori Aizawa. And, the character art for the popular posts article is Dokuro-Chan from Bludgeoning Angel.
After setting up Popular Posts in a Compact Format, I wanted something extra, so, based upon code I came across on the Blogger Help Forum, I created a gadget for Random Posts in a Compact Format to work in conjunction with the popular post gadget to display posts in the same container as the popular posts. By the way, the character art for this segment is Misaka from A Certain Scientific Railgun.
Another interesting project involved the rating overlays that appear on many of my post snippets. I wanted visitors to be able to see, at a glance, my rating for a particular anime, TV show or movie without having to view the full post. But, the snippets do not contain the full text of the post and some HTML content is automatically stripped out of the snippet. So, having information that Survives the Move from Post to Snippet, proved an interesting challenge. The character art for this segment is Yuno from Future Diary.
In the Contempo template, visitors wishing to access the underlying post can select the snippet title or a "read more" link under the snippet text, but, the snippet text itself and the snippet image are not linked to the underlying post. I wanted a means of linking the contents of the snippet to the underlying post, so, after some trial and error, I made a gadget to enable Linking Snippet Text to Posts. Last, but, not least, the character art for this segment is Gilbert Nightray from Pandora Hearts. I wanted something that featured links in a chain and, in my humble opinion, the image fits in quite nicely.
There were a few other tweaks like using CSS animation to change the background colors and to animate the header background image. I may have gone way overboard with the colors and the animation, but, I couldn't resist the temptation. It took quite a bit longer than I would have imagined -- eight years, but, I've finally moved ALL of the content from the legacy AARG site onto the Blogger platform. And, below, Internet Explorer mascot, Inori Aizawa, a girl who lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the Internet, appears in a video... Enjoy.
