Cruel, but inevitable.

Keep them coming kids – the winning entry gets to poke me with a stick while I cry over the futility of my life’s work…

Or maybe the other way around. Or both/neither.

I think I might’ve cracked what I want to do with my two secondary columns, the slim central column will be to directly support the main content, for example:

• On the homepage where the primary content space is the news feed this will contain Most Read, Recent Comments and The Boar RSS – other things relating to overall SU/student news
• On an article page this will contain Most Read, Recent Comments and Recently Added for the article’s owning organisation (also if Related Articles can be done somehow tying into the tags then maybe that too – these could also/alternatively sit at the bottom of the article)
• On an event page this will contain Popular Events, Recent Comments on Events (can this be done?)

The larger right hand column will be for alternate content types to those of the primary content area and middle column, for example:

• Events, Food Offers and Polls on pages when the primary area is News
• News on Events pages etc.

I’m still working out how local/global and now/featured work on this final column, I think on the homepage it should be focused on the right now, stuff I can do now, see now but once you get down to pages owned by an organisation it can be more ‘this is what these guys are doing now but also this important thing is coming up’.

www.warwicksu.com/scratch – for page I’m working on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbgC3qw_OlM – for the title reference

Sat down to have a cheeky hour of gaming before bed, ended up working. Lame! But as I’m here you may as well get an update.

It’s all still mutable but this is how it’s starting to shape up. Obviously depending when you look at it it may look different to its current state so here’s a screenshot as it stands (click for bigger):

Ignore the slightly garish ‘Looking For’ in the middle column (and similarly the bright yellow ‘Offers’ just out of shot if you’re viewing the actual page), these are vestigial elements from a failed experiment in colour.

That said I am looking at section colour coding and how it can be done without making it look like it’s aimed at 5-year olds. It’ll probably be along the lines of this quick sketch up in red:

The ‘Good evening Daniel’ space will be a Toolbar of sorts likely containing an Inbox, Calendar, Basket and Profile link and probably containing Admin functionality.

The central (slimmest) column will probably contain area-specific navigation and possibly Most Read and Recent Comments feeds. The Search may disappear from there.

Obviously there’s still a lot to be done (especially as this is a mockup rather than an implementable template) but it’s getting there, just need to work a little more on distinctions between content areas (what’s global, what’s context specific) but it is taking shape!

A few project ideas have been bouncing around my head for the last few days but for some reason the thing that keeps coming back up is (the fairly unrelated) rejected idea I had for part of a tesselating pattern to feature on one of the Curiositea menus that had this lovely lady on it:

That is all.