Demonic Angelicism Blending dreams with reality

A lot has happened in my life (curiously, most of it has to do with deviantART) since I last posted, and since none of the things that happened is really worth it’s own post, I decided to compile them all into one big post to share with the world. Who knows, you might even learn something from all the accidents and other things I might have done over the past few days. So basically, this post is a giant grab bag type post. If you don’t like reading about my menu design, skipping to the next paragraph should put you into another topic.

To start off, I would like to mention that as of today, my blog has almost (one more day) survived an entire month after its redesign, reaching a major time based milestone. It just happens that my next post will be my tenth post on this blog, reaching another post based milestone. Maybe I’ll find something real to post about tomorrow letting me achieve both milestones within twenty four hours of each other!

Version 1.0.0

What you are seeing here is not the original version of the theme. It is the new and improved version that I promised shortly after putting the theme up. It includes a slight color change and some things I didn’t have time to put into the original, like a working menu with search box. I also included a better, faster loading background rotator that won’t be used in the next version of the design coming out in the next few days — or weeks, depending on when I can get my artist friends to help me with some images.

I created the menu with the deviantART menu in mind. I really liked the way they made it possible to browse through the catalog easily, so I wanted to replicate that for my pages, and even improve upon the model if I could. At first, I set up a super-complicated way to track down the current page, and then insert it back into the list. This is the version in 1.0.0. But then shortly after I uploaded the theme, I realized that I hadn’t read the documentation well enough. There was a simpler method. The current page had an extra class on its list item. Unfortunately, I had already written a complicated method that involved a list item without a link. I panicked for a while, but eventually I realized that it was easily fixable with jQuery. I just added a simple

$('.menu .current_page_item a').each(function() {
	$(this).parent().addClass('current');
	$(this).replaceWith($(this).html());
});

Okay, maybe it isn’t that simple, but it did the job without me having to rewrite everything.

?Queries About #Hashes

Something else I noticed while I was browsing deviantART was that it often passed variables to itself with a hash string (#catpath=literature&order=11&offset=120), which the website would then treat as a query string (?catpath=literature&order=11&offset=120). I thought this was pretty interesting, so I looked into ways I could use jQuery to parse query strings. All I had to do was replace the ? with a # (or the other way around — depends on how you look at it). In the end, I concluded that there wasn’t any (or if there was, it was hidden too deeply somewhere) and I wrote my own. It was quite fun. The version I have up right now can break the JavaScript execution of the page if I use SyntaxHighligher, so unfortunately I commented it out. I might talk about the hash string parser in a later post though. It deserves its own post.

A Big Thanks

I’ve found a very nice deviant (deviantART artist, not someone who likes breaking rules. :P) who was willing to draw a nice picture for me. I’ll be putting it on my about page (and possibly in the site’s footer in a future theme version). And now I would like to throw a nice big thanks to litttle-princess (look at her work, she has very nice pictures — maybe you can even find the one she drew for me before it even goes up on the site).

Ripple

…

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Poems

I’ve written two new poems in the past few days. They’re both not very happy, but I think they still are worth a look. (Well, obviously, since I’m the author.) There are some messages in them that I think might be beneficial for humanity as a whole. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating here.)

Anyway, please look at them. My work might not be as eyebrow-raising as litttle-princess’s up above, but… erm… well I’m not sure :|.

The End

So here we are, at the end of the post. As you can see, quite a bit happened in the last few days, and more is still about to happen. A friend invited me to help him design the interface for a game he’s making. It’s slowing my progress on Mesh as a result. To add to that load, I have summer reading to do, Ripple to write, and a blog to update. This definitely is not the last version of the theme, and as I suggested several times before, a newer version is coming with a footer, better scripts, and possibly a new recoloring. You can also expect to see an about page (before the next theme update) and portfolio (after the next theme update) soon. Keep watching!

Update: I just realized that I typed the name of the deviant wrong. Her name has three t’s, not two. The link was always right, but I’ve fixed the link text.