Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: The Smiths "What Difference Does it Make?" ::
Well! Check it out. Yeah, this update is going up a little late, but take a look at why, would, ya?
I FINALLY changed the layout. Version 9 A Gorey Demise was nice and all, but I do believe that TWO YEARS is quite enough, yes. Then I was thinking that once again if I'm going to be redoing things around here, I may as well REALLY redo them.
For starters, I'm sure you noticed that there is no more Enter Page. Thank the Internet Gods, am I right? That thing had really outlived its usefulness at this point. Also, no more iFrame! Hooray! Now the whole page loads when ever you navigate. I had shied away from this for... well, for ever, basically, because I wanted things to load quickly for people, and I thought a little frame would load faster than the whole page. That may have been true, SEVEN YEARS AGO when I started this site, but it really isn't now. For one thing, most people have operating systems that are up to date and they are just plain faster now than they were then. And another thing is that I'd like to think that these divs are meant to load faster than frames, but I could be mistaken there.
In order to create this fancy set up you see before you, I had to recode almost every page. Which was a pain in my, well, my wrist actually. There was quite a lot of copy/pasting going on. Hours upon hours worth. Those of you who follow me on Twitter were no doubt besieged with an onslaught of whiney tweets regarding my mental and physical status during such lengthy copy/paste sessions. Sorry about that. My sanity is now returning.
However, now that they layout here is frame-free and now 100% div based for the first time, this does change a few things. Unfortunately, now ALL of the artwork is only in NEW WINDOWS. Before, the text menu would take you to the picture within the frame and you had the option of clicking on the picture itself which would take you to a new window for a better view. With divs, wide artwork would completely change the layout and make it weird looking. Since about half of my artwork would wind up messing up this lovely new layout, I decided all art would got straight into new windows for the purposes of uniformity. Don't worry; this is clearly indicated in the Art Indexes.
That's the bad part about the divs. The GOOD part, is that it is now possible for you to bookmark pages! You can also forward the URLs of specific pages onto your friends! This is going to be very handy for everyone, trust me. Now, you can send you friend the direct URL to a Rant you find interesting or a review you want to pass on! I am also hoping this will improve my results with search engines! Win-win!
Now then, when it comes to browser cross-compatibility, this layout is doing okay. So far, the only MAJOR glitch that has come to light is that in Internet Explorer it is flush left for some reason. Other browsers, such as Firefox and Google Chrome (thanks to Jimmy Misanthrope for beta testing that, by the way!) view it as centered, which it what I intended. I did try to fix this issue, but it still seems to be doing it despite my best efforts. I will continue to try to figure it out, but in the meantime, sorry IE users! Also, I have highlighted the background colour of the navigation button that you are currently using. This has the opposite problem: it only seems to work in Internet Explorer and all other browsers just see plain white text on black, as opposed to one option being highlighted in dark red. Why this happens, I cannot say, but I will investigate. That is what I call a minor issue, and will not be too disappointed if I can't figure it out. Not like the alignment issue. Grrr!
Now then, the navigation. It's still the same. Yep. Pretty straightforward stuff. BUT! I have added navigational breadcrumbs! This means that is you are ever in a subsection, at the top of the page will be a trail showing you where you are within the navigation. Go ahead and click around and check that shit out. I cannot tell you how time consuming that was since each page has its own unique breadcrumb trail, but I think it was totally worth it. User friendliness!!
I do want to mention that there could be coding issues here and there! Due to the VAST amounts of copy/pasting I have been doing, it is possible that I pasted the wrong thing someplace! I had noticed that sometimes I completely forgot to paste in the footer! PLEASE if you notice anything like that, LET ME KNOW so I can fix it straightaway!
I would like to say, that now ALL of the old Rant have been upgraded to Echo commenting systems! Echo had bought out Haloscan, so by switching to Echo, I was able to preserve all my old Haloscan comments. Unfortunately, the REALLY OLD Rants that had been using Enetation comments that I could never seem to debug, have been permanently lost. Hey, why don't y'all go check out some of them oldies and leave some minty fresh comments for them, huh? Gosh, that'd be really swell.
So, please, click around and drink this new design in! You have look into each section in order to fully appreciate its subtleties, don't you know? If you have any issues with it, PLEASE let me know! You can leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail from the Contact section if you like. Heck do those things if you like it, too! Tell me what you think! Critiques are of course welcome.
I think I'm going to have to put my arm in a sling for a few days and pack it in ice. It's bad when it turns black, right? SO MUCH copy/pasting... ! Will the emotional scars ever truly heal?
William the Bloody (broken)
