Welcome back everyone! I’ve gained a few new subscribers since my last post, so thanks to you all. Now, onto the content. This past week I’ve been quite busy with school work, since it’s the end of the semester, so sadly I A) don’t have much to talk about, and B) don’t have much time to write, since I need to study for my final exams. However, despite not getting any, pretty much, coding done over the week, I’ve gotten a bit done last night and this morning on the webiste. You may have noticed some of these already, but here they are.
Categories
In the past, I had the categories listed after pipe (“|”) characters on the home page. I assume many of you didn’t know they existed, and they honestly looked pretty ugly. I’ve moved them so that they show up on both the home page, and the post’s page itself, after the date. It looks nicer now, and I’ve changed the delimiter from pipes to commas. Hopefully, they should now be more visible, but asside from that I’ve actually added some functionality to them. If you want to be able to just see the posts with a certain category, you now can! On the home page there is now a filter bar to the top right of the list of posts. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how that’ll all work, but essentially I just use some JavaScript to either hide or remove the posts. As for the CSS, I really don’t like spending a long time on that, so I just copied it form some other areas of my blog. You’ll notice the button is the same as the buttons in the header, and the text box is the same as that of the subscribe box. Regardless, if you’re ever looking to implement something like that on a website, feel free to look at the HTML of mine or contact me. A good coder never reinvents the wheel. Anyway, I also made it so that the input will autocomplete, but that was pretty simple. Most anything you’ll ever want to do with HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, has already been done somewhere on the interwebs - just make a quick search. The final thing, is that you can click on a category next to a post, and it will apply a filter for that category.
General Cleanup
The second thing I did, was just cleanup some stuff behind the scenes, as well as visibly. I changed the buttons on the header, so instead of being sperated by “|•|”, there’s just a space. This makes it look a lot cleaner and just better in general. I also considered making the headers in posts “freeze” as you scroll past them, so they stay at the top of your screen, but decided that would take too much time to figure out and not give enough benifit. Maybe in a later update I’ll get around to it. Another utility I added, which I actually added last weekend right after I posted, is next and previous post buttons. In the header, you should notice new buttons to the right, and also at the end of posts there are now links. Should make it easier for anyone trying to read through several at once. The final thing I added was a simple scroll to top button in posts. After you start scrolling down, it’ll fade in, and when you click it, it’ll smoothly scroll to the top. Once again, I pretty much just Googled how to do this entirely, but hopefully it’ll be useful.
Wrapup
Alright, as I said this one was really short, but sadly that’s reflected in how much coding I got done this week. Next week is finals, so probably won’t get much done then either, but then it’s winter break! See you next time, and happy holidays!