Blog Tweaks

I don’t know how many readers there are out there that might have noticed, but my progress bars have been MIA a few times over the past few days as I have been tweaking the code for them (a lot). I’ve generally made a grand mess of things and I need to sit down and clean up my both my CSS and my code (I have bits commented out all over the place, and I’m doing with three files what I think *could* be done with just one), but I got a few things working that have been bothering me for a while.

Changes:

• Added day of the month to the started/finished dates (originally ravelry had no day field)
• Added finished date to FO’s (since this was recently added to the JSON, along with a few other fields)
• Added a “recent FO’s” section to my sidebar – since a lot of my projects don’t actually end up being “in-progress” at all, I thought this was a nice addition
• Added happiness info (thanks to code provided by pocketsize on Ravelry) to my sidebar and on the FO’s gallery page
• Overlayed happiness/comments/favorited info on my project thumbnail on the sidebar images.  That’s something I’d been wanting to get working for a while, I just abandoned it a while back not wanting to deal with the CSS (it really wasn’t that hard though, I’m just lazy).  I even made super tiny icons to go with that, but I’m not completely happy with the smileys… I wish they were clearer, but I haven’t yet found any the size I want, and attempts to make my own have ended in failure.
• Added titles to the comments and favorites, so you get a ‘tooltip’ with more information

Things I want to do:

• Show the medium flickr image when you rollover the thumbnails.  Not sure how I want to do that exactly, or where to even start with the code, but since I added the little rollovers to the comments and favorites, it had me thinking about those thumbnails. Solved this by using lightbox, and tweaking my code to include a link to flickr in the image caption to abide by their TOS.  Pretty happy with this, though I’d like to include more project information in the caption, but I’ll work on that later.
• I’ve been trying to decide if I want to do anything with my notes info as well.  I don’t reliably utilize this on ravelry now – sometimes I include useful information, and sometimes I don’t, and sometimes what I put is a little bit cryptic. Decided I don’t need to do anything here
  
• I would also like to get some math working to display the amount of time it took to complete a project.  So if something was a one-day project for me, I think it would be nice if my FO page reflected that… and likewise, if something took a while, I think that can be helpful to see as well. Done!  I’d like to make it a little better (display weeks and days for projects that take a while – say more than 30 days) but for now it’s a good start – most projects only take me a few days anyways. Ok, I’m really DONE now!
  
• I want to break hibernating projects out and reformat them.  Currently they are marked as hibernating by a small addition of code, but I’d like to be able to apply specific CSS to them that would be different than the “active” progress bars.  Currently the recent FO’s and the active bars use essentially the same CSS, and I’m fine with that – the FO’s of course just don’t include the progress bar itself. Done!