Faramir Fiction Archive

Minor site changes: picture display and better searches

Jun 23, 2007

Two changes to the site recently: we altered the way pictures are displayed and increased the reach of the search.

Pictures go java

The images in the Pictures section of this site used to be displayed in simple pop-up windows. Most pop-up blockers (such as those built in to many browers) shouldn’t have a problem with those, but since there’s such a variety of pop-up blockers out there, we’ve opted for a change.

Earlier this week we changed the pop-ups to a javascript powered display, where the image is overlaid on the parent image page. We also changed the links from thumbnails on all index pages (such as new additions, picture archive and the artist’s page): before these all went straight to the pop-up image, now they’ll sent you to the image page, and only the thumb on that page links to the full image. On that image page you also have a chance to comment on the image — we hope you will: those artists deserve praise!

Improved searches

On every page there’s a search box in the righthand menu, and some of you may have gone so far as to add the OpenSearch Browser Plugin, which does the same thing, but from the search box in your browser. Before, this seach only searched the Title and Body fields of the articles on this site. Now we’ve widened that search to include the author and warnings.

Many authors already include full headers in the Body of their stories (the Body is the text you see on the individual story’s page, everything from below the top two lines that read Title (Rating); Written by Author, to the comments), so for those stories author and warnings are already included. But as externally stored stories do not have a body, these didn’t show up in many searches.

Understandably, searches can now be a little slower. But you’ll get more results.

If you prefer, you can always use a search engine to search this site. We regularly ping Google with a sitemap (=list of all available pages at the site), so they should be fairly up-to-date. Just add site:faramirfiction.com to your search term at Google, and you’ll search for that term at this site only. You can also use our on-site Google search.