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[tomomichi]

This is something I've been meaning to do for awhile and took me about two solid days of little else (well, except for taking an unscheduled break for, well, you know >_>), but I finally finished it up to my satisfaction. I've completely revamped Fleeting Fancies into what I hope is a more streamlined layout, as well as switching over to using a little bit of CSS in there, which should hopefully make things so much easier in the future. (Many, many, many thanks to morning_songs for holding my hand and explaining the basics of CSS to me. ♥)

I also expanded a lot of pages, fixed up a lot of broken links (goddamned FFNET changing their URL system, grrr), played with the icons a lot, and just generally (hopefully) cleaned everything up. And, well, yes, adding all the recs up until now. (I actually updated a couple of times since I last made a post about it, but. >_> I got lazy in marking my place.)

....I'm going to go notstare at the damn coding for the archive for awhile now. ^_~




[ edit ] The layout is now viewable, but I'll keep fiddling with it when I'm not about to fall over from exhaustion. *grin* Many, many snuggles to Yin again, for she caught the mistake that I'd made that was giving me problems.

Comments

[koenma.livejournal.com]

The cramped sides don't look very nice in the recs, but I think you can rectify that problem easily. It'd look very nice too if you justified the text too :D The cells need to be a bit more spread out so people can read each box easily...

IE editing is such a pain in the ass, but a lot of people use it... I'm too lazy to use anything else but IE X3 *dodges tomato* Whee~ If you'd like I can help you out with some of the editing when I have the time... Or you can just use DreamWeaver to edit the pages easily ^__^ It's been a while since I've used notepad for that type of stuff... X3

Other than that, i love the way you did your rec layout. The colors are good and the font isn't too small, perfect. Just need a bit more tweaking here and there and you'll get a lovely layout.

[tomomichi.livejournal.com]

The cramped sides probably should be fixed now...? The problem was that I'd set the wrong td columen to be 435 pixels wide, so the entire table was that width instead of just the gray 'box' column. (It displayed perfectly in Netscape, which is my browser of choice, and my test file was a fluke because it had an image that was ~400 pixels wide so it forced the column to be that wide and I didn't notice the problem in IE.) So I went through and fixed all those, but my problem now is that the break tags are behaving bizarrely with the CSS.

If you'll notice that with any fanart page, it'll only display the top linked banner, all the images/banners beneath that are hidden. (They still display perfectly in IE.) And the only thing I have seperating each rec are three break tags, so I don't understand why that is. (I've played around with the break tag in the CSS file but nothing seems to affect it.) And it boggled my mind because on any given index page, I link those images the exact same way, yet THEY show up. The only difference I can find is that three break tags causes the CSS to go completely psycho, but if you have an even number (two or four), it works okay. WTF, I say!

If you have the time to play around with it and can figure anything out, I'd be much obliged, since I really have no clue why it's spazzing like that and morning_songs is just as baffled as I am.

Other than these small snafus, I'm actually pretty happy with the layout--I wanted something without a lot of graphics because they tend to take away from the text, and yet it still looks pretty and pleasing to the eye. I'm glad the colors work, too, thanks! I was a little wary of using pinkish-purple colors, but they seem to have come out okay.

Ahahahaha, I'll shut up about the layout now. XD;;

[koenma.livejournal.com]

Hm, which browser do you use besides IE? Certain things that are viewed perfectly in IE will not work in other browsers like Netscape. That's why you see a lot of those anime collectives say "IE only" because other browsers won't support certain styles that were used in the layout. Certain CSS styles won't show in Netscape, but will be apparent in IE. Netscape isn't as powerful as IE when it comes to viewing fancy html/dhtml stuff.
So you might have problems with Netscape with CSS.

As always, Netscape doesn't support certain viewing abilities, so if the banners dissapear, it could be just Netscape. You have to find another alternative to get that style, but not use CSS. Lol, it's a pain in the ass because Netscape doesn't like CSS most of the time.

I'll tweak with it if I can, I've yet to finish my quarter (almost ending) so I won't have too much time. I think I've got the problem down, but I don't have Netscape to view it X3; So I'll have you either poke you online sometime so you can view it with your Netscape. I usually call Netscape, Crapscape because it's usually that >_> Drives me nuts when I used to do websites and they'd view perfectly in IE and in Netscape it looks like crap *_*

Very nice layout, simple and pleasing to the eyes indeed. High-graphic layouts are nice, but sometimes the text will make it look awkward and then people will try to blend the text in with the images and BOOOM! The text is way to hard to see after >_>

*chortles* If you can send me a html of one of your pages with the problems on it, please do X3 I'm not sure if I can view source on your pages... If I can, I shall do that ^_^

[beckymarie.livejournal.com]

Netscape. Netscape, Netscape, Netscape. I meant Netscape. I can type, honest. *sheepish grin* I tend to be more of a Netscape girl, just because I like the slimmer, cleaner, more streamlined look it has, versus the clunkier style IE has. It's also vastly easier to save HTML files in Netscape than it is in IE. And I've always looked at designing this way--if it works in Netscape, it'll probably work in IE, and that way I don't have to worry so much about being multiple-browser-compatible. And the problem was in IE, so that's why I wasn't noticing it, because it's not as easy for me to check a layout in IE as it in Netscape. Everything displayed perfectly in Netscape, right from the beginning, even when the text was squished in IE.

After something in the above comment thread caught my attention about 'height', I went back to look at the CSS and started playing with it again and, sure enough, take out the defined setting for the letter spacing and *bam* back come the images in IE again. I don't understand why the break tag affects this (even numbers work, odd numbers make the images disappear again), but as long as its fixed, I'll live with whatever the reason is. XD I totally appreciate the offer for help, though, and it's been nice to have someone who understands my frustration. *grin*

I totally hear you on the cross-browser funking up of layouts--I used to design graphics-heavy layouts that depended on getting the images to line up perfectly with each other or using frames that would line up with each other to make one bigger layout, and it was a PAIN IN THE ASS to get them exactly right in both browsers. One would be PERFECT, but the other would be, like, a pixel off and it'd look weird. I'd fix it and it'd look fine in the other browser, but then the original was messed up. Drove me nuts.

And high graphics layouts are indeed nice, but they can be a strain on loading time and I've always thought that, with sites that are text-centric (like fic sites or essay sites or rec site) that there shouldn't be a hugely graphical layout, that the site should be more geared towards focusing in on the text. (Of course, I might just be justifying my lack of Photoshop skills. ^_~) If you're going to have an image gallery, by all means, go nuts with the graphics, because people are expecting high-loading times. But if you're going to a text-centric site.... Plus, I've got all those banners to take up loading time, too....

*look at how long she's gone on for* ....oh, my god, I am shutting up now. :x