Wednesday, January 9th, 2013

User's Guide 1.0

Since I'm making this site up as I go, I thought it'd be fun to chart its progress by talking about notable features every now and then.

Accordingly, I hereby inaugurate this grand tradition with the following spicy five-piece 500Benz.com User's Guide, the first known work of its kind in modern 500 Benz history.

1. Power-Furling Header

Don't thank me for this one; thank my good friend Professor Tea Bag, who took one look at a developmental version of the site and groused, "That header with the photo is too big. Why can't I make it go away?"

Well, Professor, now you can. Just like the 500 Benz's convertible top, it automatically retracts with a single click. Go up to the little "Furl" link in the upper right corner, click it, and bam! No more big header. Plus, thanks to the magic of cookies, the site's other pages will remember your furling preference. And thanks to the magic of PHP, that preference gets checked and executed before the page loads, so the transitions are cool like ice.

2. Sort By Category

This is a pretty standard blog feature, obviously, but it's worth mentioning here because it's the closest thing I've got right now to a search function. Just click on a category over in the "categories" box, and you'll be whisked away to a new page containing only posts in that category—sorted chronologically, as usual, with the most recent post at the top.

If you're wondering why I haven't thrown up one of those "Google custom search" thingies, well, I think they tend to look a little cheesy, and also, I get the impression that making a home-brewed search function would be exceptionally educational. So I'm going to attempt that someday. Meanwhile, the Sort by Category feature is where it's at.

3. "Spare Me The Details, Dude"

You'll find this phrase in brackets in the Introduction. Click it, if you haven't already. You can't thank me for this one, either, as badly as I know you want to, because the inspiration actually came from a loyal reader who expressed a certain dissatisfaction at being subjected to my rather detailed thoughts about old Lexus engines and such. So now there's an escape route, and she looks forward to her daily dose of 500 Benz that much more. Win-win!

I bet I'll use this technique again, so be on the lookout for italicized phrases in brackets. They'll probably [do something similarwhoa] when clicked.

4. Login/Sign Up "Modal Box"

Visible on every page up there next to the Furl function, the "Login" and "Sign Up" links pop up their own dedicated fun-boxes when clicked. There are also redundant links on every "article view" page, down between the article content and the comments (if any).

Re: that parenthetical "if any," by the way, I like how I spent countless hours getting these damn boxes to work, and as of this writing, precisely zero of you have left comments. I love you, Benzitos, I do, but sometimes... thanks, porschegirl, for breaking the ice with the first-ever user comment! All of us here at 500Benz.com are eternally grateful, though we respectfully disagree that any Boxster with the splattered-egg headlights—i.e., any Boxster under $10,000—is worth buying. (And we note for the record that your Boxster's headlights blessedly aren't those.)

5. Blog Comments Interface

There's no way to leave a comment on an article if you're not signed in, but once you are (see #4, above), a handy little box with an "Add Comment" button will appear below the article content. There are some internal safeguards in place, but if you just ackrite, you shouldn't have any issues.

When you're done, you can either click one of the two "logout" links that showed up when you logged in (one right above the comment box, the other next to the Furl function), or go away for four hours and let the site log you out forcibly next time you try to do something. Both approaches are devastatingly effective.

Thank You For Choosing This 500Benz.com!

With proper use and care, it will provide many years of satisfaction.

posted in: How This Site Works  

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