WYSIWYG Blog Editors

So I set up my website with WordPress again.  I'm still haven't found a theme I really love, but the one I've got is working well enough for now.  I thought about it briefly - moving my whole blog over there - but after playing around with it again, I've come to the conclusion that I like Blogger, and Google's whole interconnected suite of tools, better.

Why?

1. The editor.  Blogger's WYSIWYG editor doesn't have a ton more options, but fonts are an easy dropdown, underline is a button on the toolbar, and picture insertion is much easier.
2. Pictures also upload to my PicasaWeb account, where all my other pictures are, rather than to some nebulous place in the WordPress directory.
3. And I can upload and insert multiple pictures at a time.  Editing picture options is much easier, as well.  The pictures also automatically link to open themselves full-size when you click on them.
4. Single-spacing.  I can't seem to single-space in my WordPress theme, and damn it, I don't want to have to go in and customize all the CSS.  I went to WordPress so I wouldn't have to manually rebuild all the pages from the code up.

What I mainly wanted from the WordPress install was pages.  I haven't set up my own templates yet (believe me, I want to), nor have I found a theme that advertises itself as having the templates I want for pages, but it's working for now.  If only I could get WordPress with Blogger's editor...

Tweaking

I like to rearrange furniture. That's not really feasible in my office (limited outlets), so I tend to rearrange websites (blogs, forums, etc.) I administrate when I get to feeling like something needs to be moved around.

I didn't do a ton of set-up on this blog yesterday - picked a template that I could live with, and such - so I started fiddling around with the gadgets today. One of the things I decided to add and keep (so far) is the RSS feed for the other blog I write under this log-in. (Three posts in the past six weeks... hopefully I can get it moving more.)

One of the things I went through setting up but didn't keep was a list of links to all the other currently registered blogs for this program. It was great to set up because it meant I went and read what everyone else has written so far, but it occurred to me that, if all 150 participants register, it will be way too long and scrolly.

Past experience says scrolly is bad; people don't like to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to get to something, the same way that above the fold/below the fold matters in print newspapers. I find the scrolly problem to be true for a lot of news sites that I read; they tend to put the newest stories at the top for that reason. If I have to scroll too far from the top of the page, I don't really bother to go all the way down to see what's there.

Of course, this conflicts pretty directly with my tendencies towards verbosity. I've found that 3-to-5-page-paper is a length pretty well ingrained in me from all those assignments in high school and my undergrad. Three to five pages doesn't really sound long (double-spaced, right?) until you realize your medium isn't 8 1/2" by 11" paper, but a probably 5" column down a screen. Scrolly.

The Blogs in Plain English video has me thinking about my high school journalism class: the funnel shape for stories, putting the most important information towards the beginning, and the later paragraphs are all details the loss of which won't make the story unintelligible if they have to be cropped for space. I was never good at that, probably because I've also never been good at drafting; most of my writing is my train of thought in action, and I never learned to think in a journalistic style. Given the whole problem of scrolly, the journalism concepts are probably good to keep in mind: how many people actually read to the end of a long post?

Perhaps this is why, in my high school journalism class, I was the copy editor. I proofread, cropped, and assembled, but I didn't write a lot of content. We didn't have journalism software in my class: the school paper was all assembled on large sheets with a wax gun. If there was something last-minute to go in, I had to pull apart the sheets, rearrange, and make it fit, occasionally slicing off a paragraph here or there to make it work. I like to tweak, to rearrange, and although the list of links was pulled because it would be scrolly, I'm sure I'll find another gadget to fiddle with here before the course of Things is done.

Another website revamp?

I've been thinking about redoing kebrent.com again - partly because I like Blogger's blog format, and partly because I dislike having separate sites for static content and blog posts.

WordPress does what I want - blog + pages - but I like Blogger's blogging better.

So I'm going to see if I can smoosh the two together somehow - if I can syndicate my blog content over there, or what. I know you can embed objects, including feeds, but the feed embed is not pretty.

It would be really easy if I still used frames, but none of us would like that very much, right? I worked out all the shtml menu stuff so I could get rid of the frameset.

Regardless, I don't want to have to export/import my blog yet again.

In other news, I need to plant seeds soon, if I can get behind the garage to get my planters. I think I need another folding table. I should probably buy some dirt, too.

Layouts

I had been using one of the "stretch" layouts for this blog. You know, one of the ones that wraps the text according to the size of your browser window instead of having a fixed width column.

Then I went and tried to read a press release today that was a single block of text, with a line length of about 8 inches. It was so hard.

Short lines it is!

Minimalism

I'm finding, as the web evolves, that I abhor clutter on a website. It's actually part of what decides if I keep using a site's services or if I go elsewhere. Examples:

• CNN.com won out over MSNBC.com when the latter changed their layout and began using those irritating 'mouseover expanding' menus.
• MySpace lost hands-down before I even started using Facebook.
• I can't stand Google's homepage if I log in and add widgets - it's plain, or not at all. (Honestly, though, for most of what I go to the web to find out, I just go to Wikipedia. I use Google for entirely different things than I use Wikipedia, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

AdBlock Plus and Flashblock are, after NoScript, my most favored and beloved of addons. (Sure, Zotero is fantastic, but not for making my every day web browsing better.)

I can't bring myself to get behind Flash- and/or image-heavy web design. Give me text, darn it. I'm a heavy user of 'search as you type' in Firefox - I want to be able to find what I'm looking for by typing it as I'm thinking it. And the accessibility issues? Argh.

But, yeah. I tend to prefer clean, crisp designs. No excessive Flash; organizationally tidy; colors are aesthetically pleasing and facilitate reading. If your site is too distracting to use, I'm giong to go find something with approximately equivalent content that I find either easier to use or less hectic to dig through.

I would expect it shows in the themes I choose for blogs and the design of my own sites.

Site upgrades

I just converted the entirety of the main site from a frameset to SHTML.  It took... quite some time.  I consolidated the external CSS files at the same time, which added a bit of work, had to rework page layout a tiny bit so far as the positioning worked out, and pasted the address bar icon into all 116 pages.  Yep, 116.

It's not perfect, but at least it's no longer a frameset.