The goal for this weekend is to finish the poem page.

I'm currently re-thinking the above-poem navigation - on Plagiarist there are two alphbetical sets, one for the poets, and one for the poems - but for most poets there really aren't enough poems to make a full alphabetical list useful.

So if someone clicked on "W" and there were no poems beginning with "W" for that poet, they would be directed to a page that said "There are no poems beginning with "W" by [Author]".

Well, that's not very helpful.

So I could only display the letters of the alphabet that's actually in use for each poet. However, that's 26 database calls if I generate the results on the fly, and a lot of maintenance and hassle if I have to code it by hand.

Yes, I know I could generate a result set with the update script that would determine on a one-shot deal which letters are in use for each poet and then update the DB so that the results could simply be fetched into an array - but still, how useful is an alphabetical list for a poet that we only have ten poems for in the DB? What if they all began with a different letter? Would you rather just see a list of all ten poems and be able to click on the one you want, or would you rather have to surf to each letter of the alphabet to find each poem?

I see. Yes, I'd prefer that too.

So now the poetry section nav will include a little single line of menu options.

+ Random Poem + Top 50 + Submit a Poem

And maybe a few other features. Like they were on the Plagiarist sidebar, each choice has a little icon associated with it.

Then on the page displaying a poem a second line would appear with contextual choices for that poem, like the ability to read an analysis of that poem, read or write comments about it, order a PoetryNotes™ eBook on it, etc.

So I made a whole bunch of new icons, one for each choice/option.

The hardest part about making the little 16x16 icons was deciding what kind of object would represent "randomness" or "Top 50" or "last viewed" or "browse by language."

I decided on a die (one dice), a top hat, an eye, and a mouth.

And of course the words follow the icons, so if there's any confusion they can just read the words.

I also wanted to have different icons, or at least icons in different colours, to appear with each theme. So now I'm reading the theme cookie, determining which theme they're viewing, and then changing the graphic set depending on the theme. Piece of cake.

The thing I'm struggling with now is that there are just TOO MANY ICONS if I use an icon for each choice.

I have the "Print," "E-mail," and "Save" (to their favourites - for members only) links and icons just under the line for the title, which looks nice and works well there.

But a long string of icons and text above the poem is distracting. So do I put only text links above the poem for the Poetry sub-section navigation, or do I move everything to below the poem?

I'll work it out today. I made all of the little icons (20 of them) in each theme's colours, so I can always decide to use them or not as I go.

They're cute, but I don't know if they'll be more of a help or a hinderance. The site looks "cheap" if there aren't many graphics, but these icons may not be completely necessary, and if they distract from the presentation of the content, then they're history.

That's the nature of web design: throwing away most of your work.