20131030, 00:22 – AUGH. First page link of FPNC block is blowing shit up on the prototype front page. It sucks and it is making me angry. Possible solutions are using javascript, a static link, or a ground-up redesign. Static link seems like the sanest way to go, but I’m going to sleep on it, breakfast on it, and walk on it before I do anything else about it.

08:32 – Fuck. Fixing that problem (the easy way) revealed new problems. Problems that threaten to totally trainwreck morning chores if I don’t stop RIGHT NOW and save this crap for after groceries.

08:43 – The solution came to me while taking a dump and the FPNC block now works correctly, FSVO correctly. It’ll be a damned disaster if I ever update out of sequence but if I do I can always fix it then, or cheat by customizing the loop with a static link the way I have with the link to the first page. No information design is ever perfect – the compromises made to the FPNC include make it a piece of code that’ll have to be tweaked periodically and that’s annoying, but the end result is still far cleaner than the steaming pile of AUGH that made the MT version of the site work. Importantly, I now understand why it works on single.php variants and not on index/archive templates. On a single page the post *is* the page; on the current root page the post is *a* post and the *page* is in charge; query resets go back to the initial query and restructuring the loop so it’s a correct set of multiple loops that works Right on an index and on a single page is presently beyond my Advanced Beginner level of WordPress PHP fu.

Importantly, the damned thing works, which means content-comic.php just needs to be cleaned up a bit and then cloned and edited just a little bit for use on the front page. I’ll do that after chores.

Oh, and bug hunting. Where “bug hunting” is finishing the damned design. I just noticed that comic list containers need a parent div.

10:28 – Front sidebar edited; added .comic-page-list to wrap list-comic on the pages that call it (I think I got all of ’em), and I’m about to recommence work on making the content-comic do what I want. All of the major structural work should be finished by this evening (he lied). Ihopeihopeihopeihope (he felt).

13:16 – Lunch break. Midway into a cleanup-and-tweak scrubbing. The comic templates should be good to go; the cast templates are good to go. When I finish stuffing my face with pinto beans and brown rice I’ll apply the cast templates to the glossary templates and even more stuff will be done. Or at least ready for styling!

13:54 – Looks like the glossary is good to go.

15:18 – Just added the comic to the RSS feed. Blog posts have been cleaned up. At this point the functionality draft is down to page templates and the footer.

16:01 – Edited the changelog. Since the links weren’t munged into unique unbatchable spaghetti IDs by the import process it was possible to “upgrade” them with a find/replace. Verification took longer than the changes, but it all checks out. Walk2, then more work on the footer and content. Closing in on the structural finish; almost time for CSS!

21:27 – Page templates are done, image.php is down, just finished roughing in the functionality of the 404. I had to remove some functionality from image.php – out of the box the javascript previous/next I’ve been using grabs onto it, but I’ll be using CSS to hide the thumbnail navigation on single attachments and show it on page attachments, and JS that fires on both breaks the “walled garden.” Not that I expect Candy and the first edition or script pages to get much traffic… though now that I’ll be able to easily measure it, who knows!

Anyway. SEARCH. WITH RETSIN. And then I’m done for the day.

22:26 – I think base templating is finally complete. I’ll be making a ton of minor adjustments when I get into CSS, though – header re-structuring to accommodate the desired visual look and position of social media links, some additional tweaking for whatever I decide on for PW ad boxes this time around, corrections to whatever flaws I discover in the design, etc.

23:03 – Compressing the daily backup. CSS work probably starts tomorrow – though I am sorely tempted to make the holiday an actual holiday-holiday instead of the usual WORK EVEN HARDER!!!! spasm I usually have whenever society lights the fun lamp.

At the very least I’ll need to bulk-rename the template and do some theme-related paperwork, change the comic display hooks from medium to full, and comb over the Observer Effect taxonomy to make sure I can update it out of sequence without breaking anything. A new cover with a 2013 post date will go a long way towards validating the information design – though it’ll also introduce a few new problems for the FPNC include regardless of how well the overall design works.

That’s later. Now… now I… uh. Do something else.

20131031, 08:03 – That something else was like 30 minutes of New Vegas. Then bed. On deck for today is an earnest start on the visuals – CSS and further adjustments to the div structure to accommodate the design. I’m going to have to break the existing header to realize this thing. I may toss the stylesheet and start fresh, or this could be another “adaptation” that leaves unstyled-by-me bits working-but-differently until I get to them. I’ll decide which direction I’m going in this morning.

08:19 – Oh yeah. A deferred decision: Do I do the link pass NOW or AFTER the CSS? (He said, knowing damned well that there’s no such thing as an after when it comes to CSS.)

08:36 – Added pagination hooks to the blog index (which due to the back-end configuration is index.php).

08:48 – Fiddled with comments.php a bit. It’s still a jerkass on comic pages and the internet still thinks I’m asking how to ENABLE comments on a CPT not how to get them to listen to the AUTOMATICALLY CLOSE AFTER X DAYS setting, which they are IGNORING.

09:53 – What came back to Earth was a great rock and roll band. A great rock and roll band that looks a lot like a short list of changes to the div structure and a decision to work with the existing stylesheet, if only for the sanity of inline image handling. Finally set the Large size for media – 700×405. That’ll make for a three-wide list of comic pages, and might get used on Book covers (specifically Transitional Voices and the pending OE cover). I’ll fire Rebuild Thumbnails in a few minutes and let it grind while I shower – then it’s implementing the production div structure, finalizing site graphics and on to CSS!

10:12 – Showered. Waffling on CSS, forgot to fire the rebuild. That’s rolling now, and my current train of thought is to start a fresh stylesheet and only copy in what I need when I need it – though to be perfectly frank the last time I did that was for ATCv10. AUGH.

11:39 – Bulk find/replace on the template after a backup. Replaced all instances of twentyeleven in the body and Twenty_Eleven and Twenty Eleven in the headers. This isn’t strictly necessary but it’s the theme development equivalent of a dog peeing on car tires – this thing is MINE now. I own it, I’ve gotta support it. I’m currently collating graphics for web optimization and getting ready to start work in earnest. Lots of preparation, lots of cleanup, a little wondering why Font Awesome doesn’t have a DA icon. The div structure is either in place or should be – after graphics prep it should be CSS ALL THE WAY DOWN.

12:11 – Make that after lunch, which in turn probably pushes it to after my afternoon meeting. Graphics are optimized, fonts are in place, I can’t think of anything else to do to the div structure so I think this thing is READY FOR CSS. Holy crap.

16:52 – Back from afternoon meeting and I swear I smell like menthols, even though I have no reason for doing so. Just got majorly squicked out by a deviation on deviantart, and I’ve been leaning back towards nuking the stylesheet and going Full Retard on it. The chief reason for doing this at the moment is the fact that for whatever reason since I moved #access out of #branding the links aren’t clickable. The nav is where it needs to be for the final site. The site is navigable without CSS. The site is presently not full navigable with default CSS, and I’m genuinely uncertain that an edit is going to be better for this thing than building proper visuals from the ground up.

CSS & Template Refinement

Fuck it, I’m dancing around committing to “clean” CSS for a number of valid reasons but it’s ultimately down to indecisiveness – either way works, both methods are a lot of work, from scratch has the benefit of being creation instead of correction.

20131101, 15:30 – Practically nonstop CSS from yesterday. I slept (not much, and not enough) and got groceries but otherwise the work is about 90% complete and I just caught myself thinking I should start fixing links. I finally wrote an editor stylesheet to add some functionality to the backend – the front currently has styles that add icons for external links and for internal links that dip into the long-gone import directory. “Proper” internal links have no icons. Extending this into the back-end should make for much smoother editing work.

19:50 – I think I whacked all instances of the “import” directory. Going after lingering instances of amongthechosen.test now. CSS is still Mostly Done; I made a couple of tweaks during the editing process and have a couple more planned for after this pass.

20:13 – The .com pass went easily enough.

23:06 – Ran out of steam much earlier today; have been puttering along since – getting the work done at some kind of pace, more of a stroll than a sprint. attachment.php and the page galleries have been styled, and the design has been refined a bit. I’m starting to wonder what this thing’s going to look like in non-chrome browsers – though when I was developing first-and-foremost in firefox, Chrome was always the odd duck that required Special Treatment, so it ought to be less of an ordeal going the other way. And fuck IE. IE is in fifth place for site traffic, and out of that slice of the pie fully 3/5 of it is from IE10, which I don’t think runs on XP64 – my PC has friggin’ 8 installed. I’d say I oughtta do something about that at some point but frankly tablet and mobile stylesheets are juicier targets – if I’m going to sink time into CSS I’ll see maybe twice after testing, it’s going to be targeting a platform that people actually use!

Right, what I wanted to write about – the site is shaping up quite nicely, and at this point the only thing I *think* is left on the desktop sheet is comments. There’s gotta be more but that’s all I can think of at the moment.

20131102, 00:18 – Backup. Dead Space 1 is almost done Steaming onto my PC; after that wraps and DS2 starts rolling it’ll be time for bed.

10:54 – General tightening of the design, and some seed comments that I’ll delete after styling. I’ve completely ignored comments and commenting until now – pages don’t (and won’t) have them, the glossary and cast don’t (and won’t), only a few comic pages were commented on. Comment templates were tedious to style and difficult to edit and proof in MT4 – here, not so much. The WP comments implementation looks like it’s a lot friendlier.

Ugh. Wording is HARD this morning – I’m definitely out of a “manic” streak and into dumb fumbling bleah. I used to equate “manic” with “happy” but that’s hardly the case – in my experience, if that is what it is, “manic” is merely not having no energy to speak of. Feeling good (or not feeling like shit, at least) has little to do with it.

12:27 – Work in slow motion. Comment styles are down to the point where I have to log out to finish them. :D

15:56 – Fixed chapter listings with a liberal application of CSS. It’s unfortunate but necessary – a “properly” constructed argument that lists everything how I want it to list otherwise is waaaay outside my head today. It works and looks fine and that’s all that matters. Comment styling is done-I-think, and all that I think remains of styling is a once over right-round-the-back to see if I’ve missed anything, and any final tweaks to accommodate a possible subscription/registration form thinger. Walk2, then it’s time for the long-dreaded SEO pass.

17:!3 – The afternoon walk left me grumpy, which happens far more often than not these days. :P GO is the “ready” tag, and GO stands at zero. I’ll SEO the Pages, since those don’t count towards the total, then I’ll get started. While I expect this to take the rest of the night I don’t expect it to go beyond that – all the “GO” pass is is the addition of an SEO keyword, and a More tag where required. Shouldn’t take too long. I’ll have to remember to removed the CHECKED tag while I’m at it, as that’s the closest I’ll get to a convenient “Post Not In” check on the backend.

17:21 – Deleted the LINKED and SORTED tags. LINKED entries were properly linked prior to yesterdays cleanup operation and all entries – cast and glossary – were SORTED, so having every last applicable entry tagged means there’s no reason to keep it around. CHECKED stands at 861 but doesn’t count private posts, and the About-Cast and About-Cosmology tags are staying due to their use as a dirty filthy hack that glues some specific glossary and cast posts into the About page. Pages have been SEOd.

17:40 – GO on GO. GO at 0.

18:35 – GO is 150 (160 actual, I think). CHECKED is 711. Blog is GO.

18:56 – GO 218 CHECKED 643. Cast is GO.

19:21 – GO 272 CHECKED 589. Glossary is GO. Math adds.

19:29 – GO 293 CHECKED 568. Covers are GO.

20:23 – GO 469 CHECKED 393. Working through comic pages in alphabetical order. Started with Earth on the assumption that the admin prev/next would go date-based but so far it’s been alphabetical without a miss, so Earth through Leitmotif, about to start Light. I’ve got a rhythm down and expect to plug away until my blood sugar crashes or I finish, whichever happens first.

21:17 – GO 625 CHECKED 237. Stretch.

21:30 – GO 649 CHECKED 213. Running out of steam, maybe.

21:56 – GO 742 CHECKED 121, alphabetical end-of from Earth.

22:33 – GO 857 CHECKED 6. Wat.

22:36 – Two tagging equivalents of typos and the second Control scene monkeying up the tuba. GO 861 CHECKED 0. Search-replace to move the more tag in front of the h1 tag on comic pages.

22:40 – GO tag deleted.

22:53 – Backup in preparation for database optimization.

20131103, 08:29 – Internal 09:29. Fuck you, DST! What’s left to do? Not a whole hell of a lot locally. Another shot at a twitter feed, styling ticky-boxes (or hiding them) for the “subscribe” buttons Jetpack will add to the comments template, PW ad boxes… I could probably do a reactive stylesheet but I still favor saving that for later like I have with the DCRN. The major to-do list for today is to load this into a blog entry so I can style whatever it is the “next page” tag spits out, write some basic 11.0 release notes, then make some progress on the cover for Observer Effect. I want to take this thing live in a complete state, as the next item on the ATC to-do list is the TV.3 script and layouts. Water -24- is going to be on top for at least another month or two.

So. To reiterate:

• Local cleanup and finalization. This build log is DONE, it’s time to shut up already.
• Observer Effect cover is next.
• Site doesn’t launch until OE cover is done and loaded and properly slotted in.
• There’s still a bunch of stuff to do that can’t really be done on a local server; all that is fodder for 11.1 and will be chronicled on the Website page. I intend for that page to be terse for this release.
• Except for the OEC this thing is ready for launch.
• Mobile sheets get to wait.
• Oh and I totally need to redo all of the PN ad graphics but that’s another matter entirely.

08:41 – Closing the build log.