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Archive for CSS

Sample Chapters!

Dec18

With my novel The Darkening Dream steaming along toward release, it’s high time that I offer a taste of the book itself. So to that effect, I’ve put up the first two chapters as a sample.

Check them out here!

I even used my CSS mastery to format them in fairly close approximation of the real book. Although I used times, which is a good looking screen font, instead of Arno Pro like the printed book. But I did include the appropriate interior art that I’ve been developing. This includes chapter heading illustrations and custom separators. Each different point of view has a separate icon, in the case of these two chapters the horn for Sarah (our protagonist) and the tree for Charles. Why, is fairly clear even in these brief chapters.

Please share your opinions on the opening either here or below the sample itself.

Also for those who care about the geekdom, I upgraded the little red buttons I use on various places on the site to support roll over highlighting. This was easy, but figuring out how to flow the pair of them underneath the sidebar book cover took longer than all the other tasks today, including the styling of the sample. HTML/CSS is like that. At first I forgot about display:block and then, for some slightly mysterious reason, I had to use float:left to get them to sit side by side. Go figure.

By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Darkening Dream
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, CSS, Sample Chapters, The Darkening Dream

Video Game Page & Book Status

Dec04

I deployed a new video game topic page yesterday. This was a good chunk of work. I use a modified iThemes Builder child theme and so continued to use their custom layout and variable widget systems to build out a special page to replace the older, uglier, video games page. First though, I had to hack into the code and modify the way in which the sharing icons and related posts were being inserted. WordPress plugins often have automatic insertion into the end of the content, but as soon as you start getting a more sophisticated layout with more than one “content” on the same page that starts to be problematic. I had to turn it off and insert it manually into the right templates.

Then I spent an entire day exploring ways to implement different grids of magazine style excerpts for particular types of posts on particular pages. I ended up writing the code myself, but using Builder’s extension system to inject into the layout’s I wanted. I got it working for this page, but I’m only about 90% satisfied. There are still some mysteries. Like how to convince CSS to extend each entry down to the height of the tallest one on a line. I align them with “vertical-align: top”, but I don’t know how to match up the bottoms. I’d also like to improve the handling of the thumbnail photos and I need to figure out how to generalize my extension so I can use it on different pages. That being said, I still think it’s better looking than the old page.

Check out the new page here and let me know what you think.

With regard to my books, busy busy. I’m waiting on a second sketch for my new, professional cover for The Darkening Dream. That should come any day. I’ve pretty much finished up the interior artwork, but I’m not ready to post it just yet — soon. I’ve been working through proofs of the interior book design as well, which is looking great.

I also got back the full line edit of Untimed yesterday. Two of my editors, Renni Browne and Shannon Roberts did a simultaneous full line edit. This is on top of four drafts of higher level discussions. Getting 320 pages of line edit back is a lot to digest in one sitting! Look at the example page to the right. That’s just one page worth of edits. I have to go over them all and decide what to keep, what not, and how to rework anything suggested by the comments. But it’s worth it. Books need editing. It’s essential to have more than one set of eyes on them. And, ultimately, it’s still my book — I decide what stays and what goes.

This will keep me busy for a week or two. Haha.

More about my writing here.

Related posts:

  1. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 5 – The Method
  2. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 3 – Getting Started
  3. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 1 – Why
  4. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 2 – Specs
  5. New Book Pages
By: agavin
Comments (2)
Posted in: Darkening Dream, Technology, Untimed
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, blog, CSS, Editing, game, Line Editing, The Darkening Dream, Untimed, Video game, Website, WordPress

New Look

Aug10

My original theme, Quentin, was getting a little long in the tooth and didn’t support custom menus, post formats, and the like, although it was attractive. So I switched to the brand new Quintus which is an updated version. This has necessitated a somewhat inadvertent new look. I played with the CSS a bit to customize it, but my patience for this is limited. The new theme is wider, which is cool, but some elements don’t look as good to me like the comments.

Be sure to check out the new top menu (below the old-school paper). You can click on the top levels and get inline filtering of the post categories, or find in the drop downs various indices and popular posts.

Let me know what you think. Here’s what the old one looked like:

By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Uncategorized
Tagged as: Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, Style Sheets, Themes, WordPress
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