I’ve been a busy squirrel over this three day Labor Day week-end, redesigning my Squirrel Tao theme, as well as testing and integrating numerous WordPress plugins and retagging and recategorizing all of my posts. Last night, I went live with the Squirrel Tao makeover. My reasons for the redesign, so soon after launching Squirrel Tao, were several. First, I had become dissatisfied with the minimalism of my previous theme. It came to seem not only boring, but also constricting in its very elegance. Before choosing my old Squirel Tao minimalist theme, my previous personal website had been cartoony-looking and colorful. I had grown to dislike it and to want something more sophisticated. I had also grown to appreciate the maxim that content is king and to desire an elastic rather than a fixed layout. When I chose to go the elegant and minimalist route with the first Squirrel Tao theme, I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was bored with my theme. Most visitors would only ever look at it for a few seconds. What mattered most was the first impression it would make on them. Of course I would get bored with any theme. And I’m sure I’ll get bored with this new theme, too. The old one was not all bad. The best things about the previous theme were its simplicity, its elastic layout and its quick loading. But the old theme just felt like it had become a skin that I had to shed, and sometimes you just have to do things for no other reason that that, in my opinion. Not that I didn’t have more reasons.

My Desired Niche for Squirrel Tao

When I searched my intentions for Squirrel Tao, I realized I hoped to position it to popularize more net art. There are many web comics blogs out there, and there are many academic new media theory and gaming theory blogs around. There are few blogs that cover the spectrum of new media art and entertainment on the web from a more amateur and popular perspective. I hope to make Squirrel Tao one of the blogs that occupies this niche - a niche that encourages enjoyment, not only analysis, of art forms that yet remain esoteric and obscure to many people. My desired audience will be interested in a variety of art and entertainment on the web. My desired audience will not be comprised primarily of the people who want to read nothing but straightforward text and who think that Flash is stupid. My desired audience will have an appreciation for visual feasts for the eyes. Therefore, I would not want the first impression of my potential audience to be that Squirrel Tao is boring. I also wanted the home page to convey an excitement about net art, by featuring a lot of thumbnails of a variety of web comics and hypermedia storytelling pieces. If my mission is to poularize net art, I need to make this more obvious. Squirrel Tao needs to act like it really means it, even if that requires departing from the normal blog linear post layout with a blogroll sidebar. (And who says blogs can only link to other blogs, anyway?)

A Design Simultaneously Bright and Dark, Fun and Surreal, Fresh and Sophisticated

The design of Squirrel Tao should convey the type of content it encompasses. It should be flexible enough to easily embrace both bawdy comics and serious philosophy, both abstract theory and surrealist visual experiences, both the brightness and wonder of new experiences and the darkness of the rich depths of the unknown. What sort of color scheme and design could simultaneously allow all that? When I saw rounded-v2 by Gyslain Armand, I saw that I could have everything I wanted in a design at the same time.

A Different Kind of Blog Layout, Using an Inverted Pyramid Strategy and Contextual Sidebar Inclusion

Once I knew the kind of color scheme I wanted, I turned my attention to layout. In addition to having grown dissatisfied with how boring my previous theme looked, I had also begun to seriously dislike the mono-layout. I became acquainted with the WordPress template hierarchy. I had been ignorant as to the role of single.php, for example. I had been wondering how to make WordPress direct the reader to a different layout after clicking the link to read more, at the end of the initial excerpt. It turned out to be as easy as creating a page named single.php and giving it a wider layout. This new flexibility freed me up to add more content to the home page. The home page now uses an inverted pyramid strategy for presenting content, using excerpts and teasers to lead in to the content within the site.

In addition to single.php, I also learned about such exciting improvements as search.php, category.php and tag.php. Adding these pages enabled me to vary sidebars according to context. They also enabled me to customize the titles that are displayed at the top of the page when a reader is searching the site, looking at all the posts filed under a given category, or browsing all posts with the same tag. There was also another nitty-gritty, practical difficulty that they resolved. I wanted to limit my home page to displaying just one post. Yet, I wanted the search, category and tag pages to display ten posts at a time. Imagine how irritating it would be for a reader to page through just one search result at a time. Most would quickly leave in disgust. One more piece of the layout puzzle was required in order to have the layout and paging scheme I desired. This was the highly flexible plug-in, Customizable Post Listings. It enabled me to include three of the most recent posts to the right of the most recent post on the home page, offsetting them by one, so that the most recent post would not be duplicated. In addition, I created a second page calling recent posts, and I offset this one by four, so it would not include any of the posts displayed on the main page. Now a reader can quickly see the current post and the three most recent without scrolling down. In order to see more of the recent posts, all the reader has to do is to hit the paging button. Actually, it’s not a true paging button. I took the paging buttons entirely out of my index.php template. It’s just a button with a link to a page I created to display the thirty most recent posts, offset by four. It’s a little hackish, I suppose, but it works fine, and there’s no need for any sort of manual content maintenance.

Extended Live Archives and Ultimate Tag Warrior

In addition to making the layout more sophisticated, I also turned to a couple of plug-ins that represent the power tools among WordPress plug-ins. I had shied away from both of them for a long time, due to my perception that implementing them would require some WordPress hacking skills. I was wrong about this. Implementing these plug-ins required nothing but reading comprehension. The Extended Live Archives plug-in does not come with detailed installation and configuration instructions, but I found all the help I needed on the 24 Fighting Chickens blog. The main trick is to create a page template just for Extended Live Archives, rather than just calling its function in a sidebar. After that, some effort needs to be put into tweaking the stylesheet. For some reason, I found it necessary to copy and paste the extended live archives CSS stylesheet into my main stylesheet, before any stylistic changes would be reflected in the appearance of the archives. This was so, even though I checked the box to use a separate ela stylesheet.

As for Ultimate Tag Warrior, it comes with the most extensive help page that I have ever seen in any plug-in. If you have reading comprehension and you can follow directions, you won’t go wrong when you attempt to configure the Ultimate Tag Warrior. You will find it comes with more configuration options than the majority of plug-ins, but I really didn’t find the complexity as bad as many bloggers indicated it was. I regretted having been intimidated from using this plug-in for so long.

The Difficulty of Displaying RSS Feeds from Other Blogs

Another thing I had long wanted to do was to display RSS feeds from other blogs. I had never been able to find an RSS plug-in that satisfied me. I wanted to display not only titles, but also excerpts. I test-drove several RSS plug-ins before settling on RSS Import Two. I was put off at first by the fact that its download page was in German, but I found the comments and code in the actual php file easy enough to follow. I also found that I could easily alter the HTML and style selectors that the plug-in would output, just by editing some HTML tags and adding some div tags in rssimorttwo.php file itself. If you know some HTML, you can easily figure it out by looking at it. Other than that, I found it necessary to call the function call once for each RSS feed I wanted. I could not aggregate several feeds in one function call or one configuration page. The way I use it may be just a little hackish, but it does what I want. My only worry is caching. I don’t know whether or not it caches the feeds after importing them. I suppose I could ask the plug-in creator.

UPDATE 12/21/06: I have discontinued the RSS feeds after learning that some of them were only intended to be displayed in an RSS feed reader. I had apparently been violating a copyright. (I didn’t mean to!) I don’t have time to research the copyright, or lack thereof, for each RSS feed I may want to include here. Therefore, I’ve just discontinued all of the feeds. I don’t understand why somebody would object to my featuring an excerpt of their feed on my blog, especially since the excerpt contains a link back to the original entry to continue reading. I would think that the author would be pleased by one more little source of exposure on the web. Apparently, the way I think about it is not the way that everyone thinks about it, and I have to respect that. Nobody ever contacted me and told me to stop. Some of the feeds just suddenly stopped working, and when I investigated why, I saw that the author did not want them to work unless they were being read in a feed reader. ‘Nuff said.

UPDATE 12/27/06: If I were to implement an RSS feed within Squirrel Tao again, I would choose the SimplePie plug-in for WordPress. The SimplePie developers really have their act together, with great documentation available.

Now Back to Content

Now it’s time to return to content. I intend to change the way I write, to convey more interpretation and context, rather than simply reporting things. I intend to write about things at greater length, rather than limiting most posts to just a sentence or a paragraph. It may be more work, but it will give me more writing practice. In this blog, from now on, I will gradually develop my voice to learn to write about the more obscure forms of net art in a way that is not academic. I would love to play a role in helping other forms of net art to come out of the ivory tower and to be discussed and consumed in as lively and promiscuous a way as comics and web comics. The first challenge will be in finding a wider variety of experimental net art that is actually enjoyable, although I realize many creators purposely eschew the pleasures of plot. I also realize that new art and media forms are acquired tastes. Yet, I feel that unless this type of art is only intended for an audience of critics - or, worse yet, made to fit theory (which is backwards) - it needs to be enjoyable to at least some people, for its own sake - and not just as an illustration for interesting and impressive theories. There, I’ve said it. I’ve finally said it. The obvious…

Other Posts Categorized as Web Design:

• Rounded Sassy MediaWiki Skin Available for Download - January 14th, 2007
• New Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki Skin Available for Download - January 13th, 2007
• More Than One Way to Skin a Wiki - December 11th, 2006
• Another Brown Website - September 12th, 2006
• Widgetoko.com - A Blog on Blog Widgets - July 1st, 2006
• A Collection of Web Design Resources - July 1st, 2006
• Design Eye for the Usability Guy - March 4th, 2006