New skin: snow-comes

This new skin has been in development since last December, and I'm making it available tonight with a bit of trepidation. I'm about 95% certain that it works, but it's nearly two a.m. now, and having worked on it for quite some time today, it's time to either put up or shut up.'Snow-comes' is one of the designs that has been sitting in my 'incomplete' folder for quite some time, awaiting the creation of the code that would serve as its backbone. The design itself is not terribly difficult, as it's a standard two-column weblog design. Perhaps the colors are a bit more adamantly feminine than usual, but other than that, it's standard design fare for me.

(Take a peek at the skins page to get an idea of what it's like.)

What's different about this skin: the user-customizable sidebar. (This is the part where I cross my fingers and pray it all works like I say it will.) I've finally written out the PHP/cookie code necessary which allows you to select which options you want, save the options, and then use those saved-in-cookie options to determine which sidebar items are displayed.

Currently, there are six items available: 5 recent songs, 3 recent comments, external linklist, searchbox, and random musicians. I'm working on building up enough content to provide movie-recommendation, featured-link, and featured book/artist boxes. (This is a bit time-consuming to do from scratch; it'll be much nicer when I've built things up to a critical mass.)

I apologize if things don't work correctly on this skin for the first day or so. I'm taking a bit of a gamble, releasing this one tonight. For the time being, I'm doing some fairly extensive logging so that I can keep an eye on how things go, until I'm certain I've worked all the bugs out. If you have problems with the skin, please either add a comment to this post or drop me an email.

I'm planning on retrofitting some of the older skins with this sidebar-selection code. It will be easiest to retrofit ironworks, glacial, gothgirl, maiko, nautical, no-graphics, and mint. The rest … well, all I can say at two a.m. is that I'll see what I can do.

Right now, the code that does this is an absolute mess. I managed to get it working, but shall we say that code elegance is sorely lacking at the moment? As soon as I can get this code cleaned up enough that I'm not ashamed for others to see it, I'll make it available. I suspect I'm not the only person who finds this particular setup intriguing.

For now, enjoy. Drop me a line if you have any problems.

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