How'd You DO This?

How'd You DO This?

  The short answer is, the hard way.

This is a Blogger-based website, but Blogger is not set up for anything like what you see here. So why choose Blogger? Well, because it was free, provided adequate resources, and it came with just enough flexibility to allow me to accomplish what I wanted to do.

The “secret,” here, if there is one, is that each TAB you see in the GLOSSARY is in fact a completely separate BLOG. What holds it all together is a lot of careful interlinking, and a common base of CSS—Cascading Style Sheets—to uniformly apply a shared look and feel across all the otherwise unrelated components. It's my headache, so I get to name it, and I call it “polyblogging.”

Even within each of these separate BLOGS, the LINKS and ENTRIES are by and large all managed entirely by hand. But, not because I like it that way. Because I had to. For instance, can you believe it? Blogger has no option to sort posts alphabetically. But, GLOSSARIES are all about alphabetically. So how do you do it? Again: the hard way. You figure out that you can go in and adjust the dates of each ENTRY (post) manually, so they sort the way you want them to. Sometimes that means also tweaking hourly timestamps to determine intra-day sorting, for example, if you have to insert a few new ENTRIES in a cluster.

Well, there's more. As if that weren't enough of a headache, Blogger has no in-line headlines option. So, if you want to save vertical space and look like all the real GLOSSARIES all do, then you have to turn off Blogger's headlines feature (again using CSS) and manage all your own headlines manually. And of course, headlines are LINKS, so you actually have to turn headlines back on whenever you add a new post, so you can find out where Blogger put it, copy the LINK, and then paste it into your hand-rolled headline and turn the Blogger headlines back off again. Fun, fun, fun.

And what about those convenient alphabetical directory lists of ENTRY titles? Yep: manually. Tallies of posts, photos, and so on? Manually. Alphabetical INDEX? Manually, all the way. ...And so on and so forth.

Cross-references? Be happy I took the trouble to at least attempt to set them all in SMALL CAPS (sic). But making them all LINKS? Fuggedaboudit.

So, with all the time and trouble it took (and you don't even know the half of it), you might wonder, why bother?

Ah, well,... That's another story!