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LifestreamLets face it. This design has been up and running for over a year. Well before I moved to f2o even. And it’s getting pretty dusty by now. I’ve been working at a _slight_ upgrade, one that will look something like this. I was thinking of adapting to the design of the sympoll box, simply going for a darker shade of gray than I’m using today. The news boxes still have to remain #C9C9C9 however since I’ve been so busy with photoshop doing “transparent” images. Not revolutionary exactly but there are a couple of things that I will correct behind the scenes.
The first major change is that I’ve enabled “fancy urls”. Mainly so that Google will be able to properly links posts instead of linking the main page. It feels like a pretty big scam and it wastes bandwidth using the nucleus search engine trying to find the old posts. I don’t know if ppl even bother.
In reality, fancy urls clean up the address field of individual items to read something like host/item/537. The same goes for archived news - host/archive/1/2003-06.
The second major cleanup is the way I’ve been using the Nucleus “skins”, i.e. the code that is used to generate all the Nucleus areas of this site. When I was new with php I didn’t use the include functions to their full extent. Hence, 70-80% of the skins are still static and quite frankly a bitch to update. The important thing is that you learn from your mistakes I suppose. For the future I’ll be using the method suggested in the official skin export guide whereas the main page would consist of nothing more than:
<%parsedinclude(pagehead.inc)%>
<h1>Title of page</h1>
<%blog(main,15)%>
<%parsedinclude(pagefoot.inc)%>
Then it would also be much easier to implement code that requires two different sets, depending on whether it’s run from within Nucleus or not. Such as the Sympoll that is included in the Layout Test above.
One thing that I don’t understand is why fancy urls don’t allow for relative links though. You know in the form of gfx/image.jpg. If a relative links is found inside of a Nucleus fancy url enabled page, it is also given the “item” prefix, thus becoming item/gfx/image.jpg. Really annoying. I solved this so far by adding <base href="http://battleangel.f2o.org/"> as the first line under <head> in every document. That way I can get the css to snap it up as well. You could also stop using relative links I suppose but that would require far more cut-and-pastes 
I really should set up a meta discription of the site also. I used to have one in the past. And I should register with Google so that I get placed in a category or something. Either way it is highly unreliable to let search engines guess keywords and discriptions. They just lack the proper panache.
I’m going to call it a day I think. It’s lunchtime and I’m sick of axing html.
