Peter Kirby

I have decided to finally unleash the 2.0 version of the Early Christian Writings website. The main features at present are more navigation options and a new look. The homepage has currently not been revised, but the entry pages have. The document texts have also not been revised.

I know I have asked for feedback before, but maybe you will see something that I don't now that you have a better feel for where the site is going.

The address is http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ for newcomers.

Thanks in advance for any criticism, praise, comments, or otherwise.

I did shed some tears of joy as I am finally seeing my labors on this update come together.

The CD-ROM will not be updated until I am satisfied with the site's 2.0 status.

thanks,
Peter Kirby

Julian

It looks pretty decent, but I would center your wooden box. Right now, it is hard agains the left side. At least put in a margin.

I would also suggest making keywords link to other articles, like they do on wikipedia. For example, the Valentinus section mentions the Gospel of Truth, the latter could be linked to your Gospel of Truth section.

Anyways, your website is extremely useful and it is nice to see it updated. Some sort of functional email link would be nice, too. I sent you an email once, many months ago, and I have yet to receive a reply.

Julian

Peter Kirby

Julian, I probably got the email but it fell through the cracks when it came to responding. Please resend if you like.

thanks,
Peter Kirby

Julian

I will send you a PM over the holidays. It has to do with your eCatena. You will be checking you PMs, right? *pointed look here*



Jilian

Peter Kirby

If you look at the Early Christian Writings site again, you will see that the information for 'amount of text' and 'reliability of date' as well as 'genre' have now been filled in. However, the pages explaining these have not been created yet. With your feedback, I would like to make adjustments to these estimates and then write a helpful explanation of them.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan

Looks beautiful, Peter. I second the use of Wiki-style links.

Michael

RUmike

Peter:

I think the whole wooden frame should be centered, and also make the page background a light beige/tan color, similar to the wood color but much lighter. The white looks kinda bad IMO. But that's a pretty minor change. Otherwise the design/layout looks very nice. Good job.

EDIT: Going back, I notice there is a white border (from the background) on the right side of the wooden box only when my browser window is maximized. Otherwise, it fills up the width of the browser perfectly if the browser is not maximized. That is why I thought I thought the wooden box needed to be "centered" above. This probably has something to do with the fact that I am using a widescreen notebook, with a resolution of 1280 x 768 -- wider in ratio than most screen resolutions. I'm not sure if others with typical screen ratios can see the white bar on the right or not. Regardless, I still think the background should be changed from white to a light tan color for a more aesthetically pleasing page.

Another EDIT: The drop-down box near the top that has a list of writings in chronological order does not seem to do anything. I'm not sure if you intended it this way. I would suggest that by selecting a writing it automatically goes to that page, or maybe make a "Go" button next to the drop-down box which sends them there instead (better web design/user interface than the first option IMO).

Yet another edit =) : I personally find Times New Roman a pretty hideous font. I think there are better options, especially since there is so much text on the site. Verdana is nice, but Trebuchet MS is my favorite (11 or 12pt). But I am not sure about its availability on non-Windows machines. You might want to consider it or another font, but that's just my own opinion.

Peter Kirby

There is a technical problem with centering the whole page. If someone has experience with getting stuff to center when it doesn't 'want to', please contact me. I've seen webmasters in desperation over getting pages like this one to center.

The drop-down box will, when it is programmed, start with the current document and allow jumping to a few immediately ahead or immediately behind the current one. I believe Stephen Carlson gave me the idea when he said it would be good not to just have a static link to 'next' and 'previous' chronologically (and that's true not least because it too much reinforces a fairly arbitrary order).

When you say background, do you mean the background outside of the wood frame?

I will do some more experimenting with fonts.

Thank you SO MUCH for your valuable feedback!! :notworthy

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

RUmike

Peter -

I downloaded one of the pages to mess around with the stylesheet a bit. I seem to have it centered, working in both IE and Firefox . I'll email you in a bit with details.

Ben C Smith

Have you tried wrapping the whole thing in a div container and styling it with margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto?

Ben.