caseyg/tomhealy

Website for Tom Healy, writer and educator.

tomhealy's Issues

fix tumblrs

1. We MUST do something about Tumblr. I now have three accounts:
   thomashealy
   tomhealyfsb
   tomhealypoetry

Leenie, can you just dump all the feb and poetry things into the thomashealy one so at least the one that connects to my website has lots of content? And then can you post a note to my followers on the others that I’m consolidating and using that Tumblr as my only one now? Then I can start to use the Tumblr more like other people do, right? With photos, short text, etc, etc.

Redesign book page

Tom says:

Once you’ve clicked on What the Right Hand Knows, something really went wrong from the old website. This no longer makes an impression about my book. Let’s save the redesign of this page for later because it really needs a lot of work, but some main thoughts:

• about, not peruse needs to be first, but it’s very confusing and unclear now where this text comes from. And it’s very hard to read.
• Richard Howard’s intro and the blurbs from major poets should definitely be prominently featured on this page.
• then not “peruse", but Table of Contents with all the poems needs to come next
• then I thought we were going to link to the text of a few poems, but we were going to make it clear the publishing history and the live reading links for any poems that we could find on the internet. Right now, this is just clicking awkwardly to a mid-page to say to hear Tom reading this poem click here. This is supposed to be a good repository about each poem without violating the copyright of the book publisher.

Animal Spirits isn’t as bad, but it has some of the same problems as above - and there’s no link to Duke Riley.

essays page

• books should be called forthcoming books
• title shouldn't link to existing books

Replace bio with short bio, add long bio as subpage

Book item pagination

book page videos

Add interviews/reviews to /about page

"change essays --> prose" (again)

Yes, my mistake: it should go back to PROSE. I don’t know why I made the mistake of saying “Essays.” We just put up a speech, so there is all kinds of prose, not just essays. My bad. Sorry.

See also: issue #4

fixes

• Get rid of all teaser text on home page, including "Tom Healy is a writer and poet and chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board…"
• On "About" page, remove the small video to the right of the text.
• On "Poetry" page, remove the "Books" subhead

Books page rows > columns layout, to accommodate third book

underline navigation links

replace book covers on homepage with title, publisher, year

poetry page needs intro paragrah

• we need a header that says:
  Healy is the author of two books of poetry: Animal Spirits, a collaboration with tattoo artist Duke Riley, and What the Right Hand Knows, a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.

how to add content

delete prose and posts

add more padding between article header and content

Add semi-linked complete TOC for each poetry book

What the Right Hand Knows

A Labor of Moles
Chorus of Animals
The Anesthesiologist's Kiss
Alarm
Dead Reckoning
Milk-Truck Driver
Oh, Hi Dad
Local or Strange
Murmurations in the Wilderness
What the Right Hand Knows
My Orbit
Laments and Riddles
Living on Someone Else’s Money
You Two?
An Act of Forbearance
The Green Street Mortuary Band
Mirror, Mirror
Phocion’s Wife
Zoo Story
Doors Should Always Swing Into a Room
Gioconda on Seventh Avenue
Among the Missing
The Peacocks of Cuernavaca
The Only Fruit
Learning to Land
The View from Here
The Metaphysics of Being Well-Mannered
Body Electric
No Fear of Fire
Table of Spiders
Voodoo
For Rent
Beekeeper
Here and Now
A Possum Entering the Argument

Animal Spirits

Electric Fence
Torn is not Broken
Owl
Flat-chested Girl from the NGO
O Momma
Turning into Her
Craigslist
The Grandmother's Suicide Note
Base Camp
Quiet Hands

has_video meta for book items

buy buttons as links

Implement mobile nav

Buy links as metadata

correct email: [email protected]

remove prose index thumbs after images are migrated to siteleaf

Not sure why there is a mix of image tags and teaser text in some of these. Not sure whether it’s a good idea or it gets a little cluttered?

Remove collage placeholder

fix inconsistent link underline style

homepage should be white text with no box underline

events should have gray underline inline if possible?

videos page remove black text and blue hover

remove hover on books

Videos open in modal/lightbox?

ungroup separate taxonomies in wayfinding nav

[email protected] broken?

instantclick progressbar

TH2016 Redux

Backend

• Export content from v1 to v2
• Migrate templates
• Reconfigure hosting
• Design & Development

Sitewide

• Refresh expired typography with new fonts from Typekit

Homepage

• Experiment with several ways to highlight content from the site on the homepage.

Where

• Improve event list layout, organize in columns and with a little more typographic scale

Where > Event

• Limit line width at large screen sizes
• Remove “from Where?” subhead
• Give more emphasis to event description
• Group date, time, location, and map

About

• Bring contact information and interview up alongside the bio text

Poetry > Book

• List reviews inline instead of jumping to dedicated Reviews index
• Give each book's “About” text its own row, instead of having the righthand column get so long

Poetry > Book > Content

• Add previous/next pagination to flip between individual book content

Essays

• Display forthcoming books in two columns
• Cleanup “Essays” list layout, some have thumbs and some don’t, dates wrap confusingly, and only one essay has an excerpt
• Sort taxonomies items by how many tagged items there are
• Experiment with a way to non-intrusively emphasize the taxonomies more, since they’re still being maintained, and are an interesting way to browse, but aren’t very clear or inviting to the reader

Essays > Essay

• Bring related taxonomies from footer into a sidebar

Essays > Taxonomy

• Display essays in multiple columns with larger thumbnails, since there are fewer items per page
• Fix inconsistent list layout

"I think the home page should feel a little less cluttered."

Then there should be a little more breathing room before
Poetry Prose Where(about)s

Maybe we shouldn’t even have teasers for Poetry, Prose, Where and About sections begin right on the same page - or at least immediately after we’ve just listed the sections? It seems redundant and a bit cluttered. You can click on poetry or essays, but less than 1/2 inch below you can also click on them.

Also when you’re right there on the home page, it’s not clear why you need a home page icon. Seems unnecessary?

Maybe if we do have all of this “teased” content on the home page, we reverse the order so it begins with “About” - and it actually does have "Tom Healy is a writer and chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board which …” and then that is the link to the About page.

Then we could follow About with teasers for Where, Prose, and Poetry.

If we do this, it would be good if we could somehow visually distinguish these four sections a bit

Maybe About, Where, Prose, Poetry are bold, but the things under are not - or the titles under each of them are indented a few spaces?

change essays --> prose

blockquotes are too wide

Make essay filters more functional

• show/hide all filters? (Some are invisible but still clickable now)
• show selected filter as heading?
• button for clearing selected filter?

Add default taxonomies for each essay to Jekyll config

homepage image splice

img in dropbox

add home icon to footer

At the bottom, it reads Tom Healy, Email, Twitter, Tumblr.
I think it should be the HOME icon, email, Twitter, Tumblr.

Homepage color options

Tweak responsive styles sitewide

"It would be best if "Tom Healy" is on a line all by itself and then “is a writer” is right below it with a hard return.""

Tom Healy
is a writer.

persistent prose nav

disappears on taxonomy single pages

Under WHERE, the dates need to come first, since it’s a chronological list.

Instead of
Miami, FL April 5, 2014 1PM, it needs to read:
April 5, 2014, 1pm Miami, FL

/poetry small screen book cover overlap bug

events ordered by date

Display unattached poems on /poetry page

TH2016 Redux: Content Checklist

• Hi-res official author photo of Tom (to offer as a download)
• A lead sentence for each book, shorter and punchier than the paragraph-long descriptions that’re there now. (This is the first thing you see on the page, and we will move the description lower.)
• New photograph for the homepage (you’ll be able to change this whenever)
• Combined list of book/poetry reviews of Tom's Work and interviews with Tom, which will be moved to the About page. (Currently they are buried in an "Interviews" page at the bottom of the About page, and also in subpages of each book.)
• Short bio
• Long bio
• One image for each event, if it exists (if not that's okay, but we will make this section a little more visual!)
• One sentence explaining some of the most-used/non-obvious taxonomy pages, e.g. what is the collection of Fulbright about?
• Non-corny collage of Tom images for About page? Farm? Slides?
• Animal Spirits Duke Riley illustrations (we will scatter these around the Animal Spirits page)
• Any more book excerpts that haven't been posted?
• Any free-floating poems that aren’t attached to a book, can be a link offsite if you don't have publishing rights
• Two photographs of each of Tom's books on a white background, facing forward, but showing the physicality/depth.