Chapter Changes

Sounds like a speech therapy exercise.

Since implementing the Chapters feature earlier today, I’ve had a lot of feedback – which I appreciate, since I wasn’t totally happy with how the layout of the diary front page looked with the chapters 9as I said at the end of my last entry).

The main complaint had to do with the display of chapters taking over the top of the diary description space. I am always amazed at how many different ways our diarists customize that space – and I was trying to invade it. I had messed around with other layouts when I was programming all of this, including several tries at dropdown lists and lists in the sidebar menu. I went back to those tonight, and tried them again – now that I had some diaries made by real people with real chapters to use as test cases.

On revisiting these layouts, I liked the use of a chapter list in the sidebar best. I’ve changed the chapter layout to use this – instead of appearing in the description space, the list of chapters will now appear in the left sidebar of the page. This returns the description space to the way that it was. The only problem I have with this layout is that it has no room for displaying the chapter descriptions. I may try to fit this in someplace on the page, or I may just decide that descriptions can be left off – we’ll see.

The second comment I heard often today was that it would be nice to be able to choose which layout (chapter view or date view) would be the default for your diary. This makes a lot of sense – I don’t want to force people to use one or the other.

I’ve added an option to the Diary Front Page screen (on the Diary Maintenance menu) called “Default View”. The two selections for this are “Chapter View” and “Date View” (if you are an OD Plus member). Whichever one you select is the one that people visiting your diary will see by default. However, they can always switch to the other view by clicking the appropriate link in the sidebar menu.

I think these two changes make chapters easier to use and more ergonomically correct. I hope you agree, but of course – if you have any comments or suggestions let me know.

I hope all of you have a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow (for those of you who celebrate it) – and I hope that you get to spend some quality time with your families (if that’s how you celebrate).

The DiaryMaster