Crazy theme idea

[Ivar T]

... for a blog.

 

I was thinking of a horizontal blog - where the posts are listed up horizontally... with newspaper-like columns that cut the text into pieces.

 

Hopefully I could add some JavaScript buttons to make it easily navigatable.

 

After google-searching the ideas of horizontal sites and newspaper columns, I've seen it both roundly discouraged... but I'm inspired anyway ;-p

 

I guess this is something I can do to figure out more PHP and JavaScript.

 

If I eventually finish the theme I might begin blogging about crazy ideas on the blog.

[Wizard]

If you can make it work, go ahead, but there's a reason why blogs are vertical...

[jjpriest25]

Yea, I'm not sure people's screens are big enough to do that either. Plus with the mouse scroll usually going up and down...

I say go ahead and try it if you want to, but I personally wouldn't mess with it.

[Ashoat]

Scrolling up and down is significantly easier than scrolling sideways, mainly due to the scroll wheel on most modern mice.

[Ivar T]

Ofcourse I don't expect it to be much user-friendly, ;-p

 

A name I might give the blog is "Why stuff doesn't work".

[JcX]

That might attracts visitors to your site.....

well..... for complaining on your design style I guess....

Further more, it's like ancient for us to read upside down, not sideways.....

 

*Ancient Chinese reads from top to bottom, right to left

[Wizard]

  JcX said:

That might attracts visitors to your site.....

well..... for complaining on your design style I guess....

Further more, it's like ancient for us to read upside down, not sideways.....

 

*Ancient Chinese reads from top to bottom, right to left

We still read from top to bottom sometimes.

[Ivar T]

A problem I'm having is trying to get all the posts to actually be listed up horizontally - Browsers seem very eager to put one element below the other.

 

When I'm looking at the site The Horizontal Way I see that they have had to define the width of the document's body. The JavaScript code that I use to cut up the posts into newspaper columns apparently needs to run before the body's width is defined... and I'm just beginning to learn JavaScript... ;-p

 

Can't turn back yet though.

[Wizard]

  Ivar T said:

A problem I'm having is trying to get all the posts to actually be listed up horizontally - Browsers seem very eager to put one element below the other.

 

When I'm looking at the site The Horizontal Way I see that they have had to define the width of the document's body. The JavaScript code that I use to cut up the posts into newspaper columns apparently needs to run before the body's width is defined... and I'm just beginning to learn JavaScript... ;-p

 

Can't turn back yet though.

*stares at Horizontal Way*

Very cool site.

But there are some problems with the arrows that scroll horizontal, not to mention some rendering errors when I scroll.

[Ivar T]

I'm already inspired by that italian web developer who made that site. Apparently he offers some tools useful for making horizontal sites, like the scrolling feature and arrows on the Horizontal Way.

 

I want to follow that guy's blog, but I really don't know what the blog's RSS is showing... doesn't seem to be the posts...

[mindstorm8191]

That HorizontalWay site looks quite interesting actually. I notice that things are merely placed into block, which can be clicked for further information - but alot is placed on the page as is. Perhaps website news could be made like this: have blocks for different stories, including the opening of the main story, and clicking on it will bring up the rest for you to view. Though it seems the horizontal layout is only so useful. I think it would be more useful for the blocks to be like cards, of some kind, and you could somehow shuffle them around until you see one that attracts your attention.

[Ivar T]

This is very much under construction, have only tried it in Firefox:

 

http://spektralen.site90.com/

 

I also wanted to have a drawings' gallery over the posts, while still mantaining a minimum height.

 

It seems difficult to get the whole thing vertically aligned. The only way I can think of is to put a table and cell around the whole thing and get JavaScript to define the height of the table relative to the client's window - that I wont do.

[Wizard]

  Ivar T said:

This is very much under construction, have only tried it in Firefox:

 

http://spektralen.site90.com/

 

I also wanted to have a drawings' gallery over the posts, while still mantaining a minimum height.

 

It seems difficult to get the whole thing vertically aligned. The only way I can think of is to put a table and cell around the whole thing and get JavaScript to define the height of the table relative to the client's window - that I wont do.

Nice job. To align them vertically, you could make a css class that has the same top values and assign that to all the posts.

[JcX]

T'was truely interesting though....

it reminds me of some flash using this kind of concept too...

The main content slides through each other horizontally, kinda looks like this

 

http://www.crisiscore.com/

[Ivar T]

Finally managed to get the newspaper columns to work in Chrome aswell - I've begun using chrome while I cruise the internet (screenshot). The blog looks rather nasty in IE (no newspaper columns and the posts are listed up vertically - conflicting with the rest of the layout) but that's not too much of a tragedy IMHO.

 

I think I'll have this blog as a personal pad for more *artistic* purposes, rather than professional, and in my preconceptions I don't have to give a s*** about accessibility if that's my plan. If I figure out how to make it work in IE aswell, well then that's great, but it's not priority.

 

Will probably try Wizard's tip next.