Tag Archives: Mechanical Nation

MN: Site Update

The site layout needs to change.

For home-page: (the blog page will be another page)
On top: Site title section: site title on left with advertising space on right.

Below title section is the top navigation menu.

Large ‘top’ widget area. Divide the area (screen width) in 2 sections. One section will list an up-to-date list of podcasts (with link to the blog entry that featured it) and the other section will list the latest album releases in a chronological format (sorted by day posted).**
Widget area can be grown down for as many rows I need -> album reviews? photography?

Below the large widget area, is the main site content area. This space is divided 4/5 left area  (for content) and 1/5 on right for widgets.

Top of the right widgets bar has a sponsors area.

** Re: podcast widget area. The widget displays a limited number (6 or 7 of “featured/recommended” podcasts. The featured podcasts are choosen by me (have to work on a mechanism to allow for this). All podcasts will be tracked. And they can be followed in the blog area/rss feed, with the “featured/recommended” podcasts  being in the header of each blog.
All the podcasts will have a rating system implemented where users will be able to rate the podcast. This rating (average of last months’s worth of votes) in turn determines the sort order of the listings for both the featured and regular podcasts.

Mechanical Nation : to do

For the podcasts, categorize the podcasts. Ones that are purely music, and ones that provide some other content.

Create a widget to display a list of the tracked podcasts with a link to their respective latest podcast. If a podcast has not had an update in xx number of days/weeks, take it off the widget list (but still track it/query the RSS feed internally).

New Layout-  Across the top will be the title. Beneath the title, there will be a grid, 2 boxes wide and x number of rows. Each box will contain a widget. Each box will have an defined height, and scroll bar. One widget would be the podcasts list. Another would be the latest album releases. Another would be latest photos. Another would be album reviews.