Working on my website

[sholio]

I've been working on my website tonight, and I've put up a preliminary version for perusal. NONE of the links work yet -- the only part that's up is the main page. I'm just wondering if people experience any extreme weirdness when they view it. I write all my HTML in a text editor (yes, I'm weird that way) and this is the first time I've ever tried to use CSS, so I'm kind of nervous that all my careful formatting will look like total crap on different browsers.

Yes, some of the text *is* supposed to overlap the pictures. But if all is working as it should be, you should see a big banner image at the top, a short column of text down the left side with a picture of John and Rodney under it, and on the right side, a list of links to the various stories. Is that what you see?

http://www.laylalawlor.com/friendshipper/

Comments

[angw.livejournal.com]

Looks good and just how you described it. Wow - soooo many good fics *grins*

[sholio]

Thank you! And ... yeah ... I hadn't realized how many of them I've written (in a very short time, too) until having them all listed there -- which probably explains why I've been having so much trouble getting anything else done!

[ratcreature]

The layout looks like you described, but you assume a wide and/or high-resolution monitor, and have a fixed width. So when I look at it with my smallish laptop monitor and its 1024x800 resolution I need to scroll horizontally to see all the text, which really sucks.

[sholio]

Okay, very valid point about the fixed width. Since I'm learning CSS, I started out using the code from a template in GoLive as the basis for the page -- and I haven't been able to figure out how to change it to variable width without breaking it. But I'll work on that tonight. (And there's no reason whatsoever why the left column has to be that wide, either.

Thanks!

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Looks pretty good, though in Firefox at least I'm getting a scroll bar on the bottom for no discernible reason. It looks like maybe the top picture is forcing it to extend? or something? CSS is whacky like that...(just been teaching it to my sis, been loads of fun. she now loves IE as much as I do...)

Do you use HTML-kit for your editing? It's a very nice freeware HTML text editor, you can write everything out longhand but it colorcodes the tags and such...(I much prefer text editing to anything else myself, I like to see my code!)

[sholio]

Huh. Maybe I should make the top picture narrower? Or maybe it wouldn't do that if it was embedded in the CSS, which at the moment, it's not. I shall play with it.

I use BBedit, a free text editor for the Mac. It's totally bare-bones (which in fact is what the BB stands for) -- basically it's like Wordpad with a few features Wordpad doesn't have, such as a lot of advanced find-and-replace options. I like the fact that I know it's not sticking in ANYTHING that I don't put there; you can even control what kind of line breaks it uses (Mac, DOS or Unix).

Sometimes it would be nice to have some form of syntax checking, though -- especially when screwy stuff happens and I spend half an hour tracking it down to a missing bracket somewhere.

[iamrighthere.livejournal.com]

It looks good, here. Visually interesting, easy to navigate. I'm using Firefox, but I don't know which version. I'm very glad that you're archiving your own stories, since FF.net is often fussy.
And I really like the picture you've put up there with Sheppard and Rodney. Don't know why. Just something appealing about it.

[sholio]

Thanks for giving it a perusal! Yes, I'm getting thoroughly fed up with ff.net's pickiness. I will still be archiving there, but I wanted to have an offsite archive as well. And a few people have told me that they don't read fic on ff.net so can't read my stories unless they're somewhere else.

The John/Rodney picture is from one of the Progeny publicity shots. I just needed an interesting picture that was vertically oriented, but I find it quite a nice picture to look at. (Of course, there aren't too many pictures of them that I *don't* like looking at. ;)

[balikpulang.livejournal.com]

Looking good! I've put a link to your website on my LJ "shortlist." And now I've discovered even more fic I've not read yet - how on earth am I going to get anything done these next few days?!

[sholio]

Thank you! Actually the permanent URL for the page (which is working now; it wasn't last night, because the subdomain took a little time to propagate) is http://friendshipper.laylalawlor.com -- although the other one should continue to work as well (since that's how my web host deals with subdomains, by creating a folder in the directory).

I know what you mean about "so much fic to read, so little time". I've actually started reading fanfic at work lately, which is a VERY dangerous step on the downhill slide. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

It looks ok, but I have to scroll over to see the whole thing. Also, I get a picture of a shoulder and McKay, no John. Sometimes using percents instead of pixels for width can solve the width problem.

[sholio]

I've fixed the scrolling issue. As for why you're getting only part of the John-Rodney picture ... see, THAT is why I fear CSS ... because the more formatting you do on a page, the more likely that what people see is going to be not at ALL what was intended ...