Welcome to LKL 4.2. Regular readers will have noticed the design change I made over the weekend, which I’ve been playing with on my test site for a while.
In the past I’ve consciously kept the LKL front page as boring-looking as possible: when I launch the front page at work I don’t want to be greeted with a big colourful picture of a Korean celeb. But for a while I’ve been introducing thumbnail images into the sidebar to draw your attention to particular events, so I’m now ready to introduce a little bit more colour to the main content section. In LKL v4.0 I introduced thumbnail images to accompany the post-summaries on the archive pages. And now I’m introducing them to the two lead articles on the front page.
v4.1 enhanced the navigation links below single posts. The big change in v4.2 is to have the two “lead” articles at the top of the front page.
In general, the top left article will be the very latest article. When I post something new, the previous article in the top left slot will drop down into the “recent posts” section.
In general, the top-right space will be occupied by a random article from the archives. But not just any article. For example, an announcement giving advance notice of an event which happened two years ago won’t be seeing the light of day again. I’m progressively going through the back catalogue of posts, tagging those articles which are worth recycling periodically. And now that my researches into the capabilities of WordPress are gradually paying off, subject to caching, every time you visit LKL you’ll see a different gem from the back catalogue in the top right space.
But every now and then the top right space can be used for other purposes. Yesterday we had the two parallel accounts of the Thames Festival, for which the two parallel spaces were ideal. And I don’t want a geekish post like this one to be the only “lead” article for the day, so for around 24 hours this post will occupy the top right slot, allowing more Korea-specific content to occupy the lead top-left position.
I’m still working on the separate home pages for the different content channels. The Film Zone page is still the only one that I’ve released in draft so far [now taken offline], but more will be coming soon as I go back over the past content enriching the metadata to enable better querying.
Maybe, one day, I’ll be advanced enough in my coding to be able to build the calendar & events list functionality which no-one has developed yet. But if I get to that stage, I won’t be writing any content for a while.