And N-Now the News

From The Max Headroom Chronicles
Revision as of 15:50, 22 January 2016 by Max Headroom (talk | contribs) (→‎Some Notes About the New Site Design)

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Recent updates, changes and additions.

Recent Update Log

Official Max Headroom Time

Entries are in reverse chronological order, and read from the most recent backwards.

  • January 2016
    • Quite a bit of fine-tuning to the styles, including the new active background. Please do let me know if the animations add up to "too much!" - I am aiming to keep the site visually interesting in a Max vibe, but without looking like some horror from the early days of the web.
    • Created a long-overdue page about Max's various video releases. A good start, but it will be a long time in filling out with the last details.
  • December 2015
    • Plugged in an extension to allow responsive display for mobile devices. It's a start.
    • Swapped out the fonts to get closer to that elusive retro-Max look. Also got the code for the Max Clock working under this platform.
    • Adding a little more to the navigation, with "go to top" bars on the long pages, and duplicating the episode-to-episode bar at the bottom of all but the short episode listings.
    • I think the dark theme is at the 99% adjusted point. Comments welcome.
    • Switched over to the dark color scheme I've wanted since the beginning. Improved skill with the platform skin and the change to MonoBook brought it within reach. Lots of fine-tuning and fixes to do, though.
    • Collapsed main InfoBanks table to reduce the number of entry links and pages, mostly in the Admin section.
    • Added "Performers" section to Guests page.
    • Major change to site skin (using MonoBook instead of Vector as the much-modified base).
    • Updated YouTube links for both versions of Sting interview (Episode CH4.1.13 and Episode CH4.2.1 )
  • November 2015
  • 5 August 2015 - Received a copy of the rare German translation of the telefilm book and added an entry for it. Some associated rewrites on the same page.

Some Notes About the New Site Design

This is an evolving meta-discussion about what's happening here, where various parts of the site development are going, and what's planned for currently unfinished areas.

1. Site Content

The content of the old site has largely been transferred to this one. The current goal is to get as much new and basic information into this framework, including material that's years overdue for presentation. We're mostly there, although the last few shows continue to await time to complete the full documentation.

I am particularly proud of the overall "Shows" structure, which lists for the first time all Max Headroom shows, in their correct order, with verified air dates and increasingly complete information about show content. In all this, especially in re-establishing (possibly for the first time in the internet era) that there were three seasons of show produced by Channel Four, I am indebted to Simon Kelly.

The show listings themselves are increasingly complete - I have most of Season 3 still to fill out, all of Season 4 (Cinemax) and a few of the ABC series episodes. Getting there. It's slow, painstaking work and I do it amid other stuff.

2. Site Organization

The current site organization and navigation is increasingly finished, but is still subject to revision as the infobanks get closer to completion. I want to make it easy to browse and connect from one item to other relevant ones, but without linking every keyword in every paragraph - that gets distracting and counter-productive. I think I'm past major rearrangements now. The goal is an overall site structure that permits a natural, organic connection and cross-reference strategy - every "wiki walk" here should be a pleasant one.

Some of the index/cross-reference pages like Actors and Characters are still an incomplete mess, but others are approaching their final form and are hopefully interesting and useful.

3. Site Design

This site in no way resembles what I envision for the final look. The MediaWiki platform allows some style and design changes at a simple level, but resists the major reskinning that, say, WordPress has come to permit. So I am tinkering a little with the basic big-wiki look as I go, but expect to drop in one day and see a dramatic change - something, I hope, much like the old site but adapted to a modern platform and perhaps a little less aggressively retro. M-Max look... but not Max era.

And I like to think I'm getting there, despite the limitations of the platform. Judicious use of CSS animation has freshened up the look. I think. You?

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