Menus a la Carte

Posted on by Simon J. Wood

Those of you who follow this blog will have observed that the stories and articles have been categorised by word length since the genesis of the site, four whole years ago this month! And the main menu worked with those categories.

As the number of stories grew, drop-down menus were added to make it possible to see the titles of each individual post within each category.

All fine and dandy, but as the stories and articles grew longer, and the number of stories and articles grew too (to over 300), the menu system became cumbersome and also didn’t work on mobiles and tablets, a significant minus. Also, a title isn’t necessarily helpful in telling the subject of the story. In fact it’s not unknown for it to be deliberately misleading!

So, the drop-down system has been consigned to the bin and a new streamlined system employed. All stories were categorised by subject and found to fall into eleven main categories (some stories fell into two or even three categories).

Accordingly, these new subject categories have taken pride of place at the head of each page. And mobile and tablet menus work just fine too.

So, it just remains for me to say that clicking on a subject category will take you to a table of all stories in that category, listed in alphabetical order, together with original publication date and word count. So, you get the best bang for your buck before deciding to plunge into actual reading!

For good measure, there are the Index and Contents pages, selectable from a menu at the top of the right-hand sidebar. The Index gives every post on the blog in alphabetical order and the Contents page does likewise, but divided into the original sections. Namely, 100-word, 200-word, 300-600 word, and longer stories. Plus, three subsidiary sections.

Some other ways of quickly accessing posts are via the Search function, Recent Posts and Recommended Posts listings, and Top Posts and Pages widget, all in the right-hand sidebar.

So I hope visitors to the site will now enjoy easier access to every post on the blog and to the type of story/article they wish to read.

Finally, the ‘theme’ this site worked on was, like the replicants in Blade Runner, ‘retired.’ So, it’s now running on a shiny new theme which I hope you’ll agree works pretty well. If you have any suggestions, positive or negative, please let me know, either by replying to this post, or via the Contact page.

So, without further ado, here are the new subject categories. Clicking on them takes you to the aforementioned tables of stories/articles.

And the following three categories are selectable via the Miscellaneous link, and also the Contents page.

ENJOY!

 

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