“The Fan” is blog/webzine providing news, opinion and commentary on
(predominantly UK-based) football teams, competitions, players and managers.
The site provides stories in 2 formats: quick 1 or 2 paragraph news
items (shorts) and longer (generally more authored) articles.
The Fan front page
The Front Page of the site shows a selection of the most recent articles, editorially controlled so that the most relevant stories are prominent, rather than the newest as a standard blog would provide.
The Latest News page merges articles and shorts so that the newest stories appear first. Regular visitors are likely to use this page more. The Archives work similarly, but present stories by category.
All articles and shorts have their own individual pages for inward links and to receive and display comments.
Search and RSS feeds are also available.
Expression Engine
Using pMachine's ExpressionEngine 2 weblogs were created for stories: 1 for articles and 1 for shorts. Both shared a single set of categories.
A further 2 weblogs were set up for the front page pulls (adverts to parts of the site I wanted to highlight) and for the 'Bias Wall' a DHTML 'widget' to display the site's editorial biases. This weblog allowed new teams, players etc. to be added from EE.
The 2 story weblogs were merged on News and Archive pages 'kottke-style' so that articles and shorts appeared together chronologically. The 2 weblogs' Path Settings were set up so that their story URLs pointed to different templates.
Categories were set up as a 2 level hierarchy. To replace the C10-style category archive links the 'Global Weblog Preferences' had 'Category Names In Links?' set to YES. Spaces in category names were changed to hyphens and the Find and Replace plugin was used to replace the hyphens with spaces whenever they were displayed on page.
References to index.php in the URLs were removed using techniques from Remove index.php from URLs
The Magpie RSS plugin (installed by default) was used to include 3 useful feeds on the front page.
Design details
The site was designed on 240px grid, uses sIFR for headlines and provides a CSS switch to display a wider front page if the user's browser resolution is high enough (as described in CollyLogic's Redesign Notes 1: Width based layout).
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