The Origami Forum

So I finally dragged myself into the 21st century and experimented a bit with RSS feeds (including the feed for this Origami Forum), and here's the result: Origami News Aggregator

It's highly experimental at this stage - comments or suggestions are welcome!

Why haven´t you told us that you have a new blog?
Let´s see how long I will need to succeed with the crease patterns there, the last one (Griever) took me an age to collapse (that reminds me, that I should finish the model sometimes...).

Good work

Yes, well, that blog's experimental too. I figured dumping stuff there is easier than writing a book.

I've done a few more revised crease patterns for the griever, but as usual I've yet to get started on any folding.

It's a nice start, just some suggestions:

1. Maybe extend the list of forum entries from 10 to say 20/25. If you can't check the forum for even a day the last 10 entries are usually not enough to keep you uptodate. (even though that isn't a problem if you login and check the unread topics...)

2. The font for the forum topics seems to be a bit big and bold...

3. You might want to include a list of the websites/blogs which are included in the aggregator. That way it's easier for people if they want to tell you about a new blog that hasn't been included yet.

4. Convince Nicolas Terry to provide his news as RSS-feed so you can include them in your aggregator

Oh, and your own blog is really interesting, keep it going

Thanks for your suggestions! I've played around with the template a bit, and so far it seems to me that a double column format works best (otherwise you'll have to scroll down forever past the forum news alone.

Daydreamer wrote:...suggestions 1, 2, 3...

Done, done and done!

Daydreamer wrote: 4. Convince Nicolas Terry to provide his news as RSS-feed so you can include them in your aggregator

I'll encourage more people to provide their website news as RSS feeds too. It's not too hard, just an evening's worth of php programming...

... and soon your Aggregator will become the most valuable Origami-news-source on the net

The two columns work very well
But taking into consideration that the blog/website-list is far longer than the forum-list I would switch their sides (but that's just my sense of aesthetics).
And talking about the length of the list... are you planning to let it go on for ever or will you archive older news to a separate part after a while?

I'm going by the convention that most folks look on the left of a webpage first, so that's where the latest news would be (the forum gets updated more frequently than other sites).

No archival plans at the moment, that sounds like too much programming work which I don't quite have the inclination to do at the moment.

Loving the aggregator. One page formatting problem that I'm experiencing: I use a tablet PC, so I usually view websites in portrait orientation instead of landscape. My screen resolution is 768 wide x 1024 high. At that view the table extends off the right side of the window, and the forum entries table cell is a skinny column along the left side. Could you even things out a bit? Thanks!

Joseph Wu wrote:One page formatting problem that I'm experiencing: I use a tablet PC, so I usually view websites in portrait orientation instead of landscape. My screen resolution is 768 wide x 1024 high. At that view the table extends off the right side of the window, and the forum entries table cell is a skinny column along the left side.

To avoid this problem, design could avoid <table> formatting, and prefer <div> structure with style-sheet (using float property) : if the screen resolution is different from the resolution with it you have made your design, the two columns will be restructured in a more usable way.
Second thing : even if you have two columns, you should provide at the front of page a little menu that point to each section of your page.
One other thing: your html file contains two prologs and two headers, which could give some problems to some browsers.

Hope this help. Ask me if you want more precision.

Great, thanks for pointing these out, Aurèle! I'll have a look at the code again in the next few days. My thinking is still very much pre-CSS, which is why I'm still wrangling with tables...

Much better, thanks!

Good to hear it's working fine. Now to exorcise the table demons from the rest of my website code...