The Enid Blyton Society

Yes that would be nice. It would match the new banner wonderfully.

I emailed Nigel a long, complicated answer to this, but the short version is: Yes, that's the plan, but it's going to take some fiddling and I haven't had a chance yet.

Keith Robinson wrote:I emailed Nigel a long, complicated answer to this

Did he understand all the technical terms?

No, he just looked at his watch with a Homer Simpson look about him. I could "see" this even in his email.

Keith Robinson wrote:No, he just looked at his watch with a Homer Simpson look about him. I could "see" this even in his email.

At first, I read that as 'he just looked at his Homer Simpson watch...'

Well, I said in an earlier post that I had an idea on how to enhance the Cave of Books pages. So, in an effort to put together a working prototype, I've been learning the vagaries of Javascript intermittently over the past three days, and since I couldn't sleep last night, I decided to stay up and finish it off:

http://www.seriesbookart.co.uk/sandbox/" target="_blank

As you can see, I've added a little caption under the main image, and made the list of reprints clickable too. Also, whenever a reprint cover is selected, the particular corresponding entry in the list below is automatically highlighted.

Anyway, these are just a few minor ideas for us to chew over. Keith, I hope you don't mind me playing around with your code, and please feel free to fiddle around with the javascript if you think you can tidy it up a bit.

Yawn! I'm off to bed...

I rather like the enhanced "clickability."

Another thing I was wondering about is whether it might be helpful to have some link between original titles and continuation novels for the various series. For example, if you click on the category "The Adventurous Four" there is no mention of the third Adventurous Four title which was written by Clive Dickinson, using a short Adventurous Four story by Enid Blyton as a starting point. It is necessary to go to a separate alcove in the Book Cave to find the continuation books.

The Adventurous Four books have had some lovely dramatic covers over the years. Gavin Rowe's cover for The Adventurous Four - Stranded! (a reprint of The Adventurous Four Again!) is striking.

Anita

Ian Regan wrote:Well, I said in an earlier post that I had an idea on how to enhance the Cave of Books pages. So, in an effort to put together a working prototype, I've been learning the vagaries of Javascript intermittently over the past three days, and since I couldn't sleep last night, I decided to stay up and finish it off:

http://www.seriesbookart.co.uk/sandbox/" target="_blank

As you can see, I've added a little caption under the main image, and made the list of reprints clickable too. Also, whenever a reprint cover is selected, the particular corresponding entry in the list below is automatically highlighted.

Anyway, these are just a few minor ideas for us to chew over. Keith, I hope you don't mind me playing around with your code, and please feel free to fiddle around with the javascript if you think you can tidy it up a bit.

Yawn! I'm off to bed...

This is exactly what I have in mind!!! But I am definitely not an IT savvy.

An interesting experiment, Ian. Keith and I had discussed the reprint situation and talked about something along these lines, as I am not very happy with the current set up when a book has numerous reprints - you have to count along the line each time to see which book is being described. What we actually discussed was removing the list altogether, so that when you clicked on a reprint the relevant details came up under the picture of the book. As things stand, with something like Five on a Treasure Island you can't get the list and image on the screen at the same time, so even your system would have a problem here, Ian.

We are still working on it and I know Keith has plans to add a next and previous button to the page, so that it is possible to go forward through a series without going back each time, something I asked him to do for the magazines and he thought it was a good idea to do it for the books as well. He has already done this for me in admin, which makes things considerably easier.

Looking at your Adventurous Four query, Anita, I wonder if the best thing would be to add Shipwrecked and Stranded to the Continuation books, as they were heavily edited in much the same way as the Riddle series and with changed titles perhaps they don't really belong with the original books. Opinions please!

Great ideas, everyone! Ian, your example is excellent and one I hadn't thought of -- it's certainly an improvement on the current method! I actually think it's really nice, and I'd go further and make the highlighted text REALLY highlighted (with yellow or something).

But Tony's right too, in that it's a wee bit difficult to have all the reprints and reprint text on the screen along with the large book cover at the same time. I was going to do a similar Javascript thing where the reprint text is hidden by default, and when you click a reprint cover, the appropriate text information pops up somewhere -- perhaps right under the reprint covers, or in the grey strip to the right of the word "REPRINTS." That way there's only one line of text present at any time. (I think I'd also have the reprint cover itself show a border when it's selected, so it's clear which we're looking at. To do that it would be best to set a 2px white border around ALL the covers and then change the color to red or yellow when selected -- that way the sudden addition of a border on a selected cover won't make them all shift about.)

Do you fancy having a go at that, Ian? I like what you've done and it should be fairly easy to adapt. If not, I'll get to it at some point (and will probably steal your code as a starting point!!). Of course, I have the additional challenge of programming this code so that it's all automated as the data is plucked from the database, but I have a plan for that too.

Anita, your idea of having related books on the same page is a good one too -- a very good one! -- and I think this could be fairly easy. We could have a section that says "Related books" or something, which just grabs anything from the database that contains the keywords "famous five" or whatever. Something along those lines anyway.

And yes, the "next and "back" links are coming shortly, I promise!

Tony Summerfield wrote: As things stand, with something like Five on a Treasure Island you can't get the list and image on the screen at the same time, so even your system would have a problem here, Ian.

That's an excellent point Tony and something I hadn't thought of. One possible solution would be to keep the First Edition cover fixed in its current position, and have the dynamic image moved to the Reprints section, right next to the thumbnails and keys. I've quickly mocked-up a page using the Treasure Island covers to demonstrate how it could work:

http://www.seriesbookart.co.uk/sandbox/ ... _test.html" target="_blank

Yes, I think that looks quite good, Ian. What I don't terribly like is the highlighted version of the first four going to a second line. Is it possible to move the listing left, flush with the images, as I think this would rectify this problem.

Playing devil's advocate, I am wondering what this would look like with a book that has only got one reprint, such as Girls' and Boys' Circus Book?

Keith Robinson wrote:Great ideas, everyone! Ian, your example is excellent and one I hadn't thought of -- it's certainly an improvement on the current method! I actually think it's really nice, and I'd go further and make the highlighted text REALLY highlighted (with yellow or something).

Thanks Keith! I must admit that I was really struggling for a while there to figure out how to achieve this effect using Javascript. Getting a line in the list to become highlighted after being clicked on was easy enough, but the difficult bit was trying to fathom out how to turn that highlighting off once another cover had been selected by the viewer. Thankfully, Google eventually provided the answer after I had sifted through a great deal of web pages and tutorials on the subject.

Keith Robinson wrote:But Tony's right too, in that it's a wee bit difficult to have all the reprints and reprint text on the screen along with the large book cover at the same time. I was going to do a similar Javascript thing where the reprint text is hidden by default, and when you click a reprint cover, the appropriate text information pops up somewhere...

This is something I tried to address with the Treasure Island example in my last post. I personally find the list quite useful as it facilitates the easy comparison of different editions and their particular details, so I wouldn't want to see it removed completely. One approach might be to keep the reprint list, but in the form of a drop-down menu located just underneath the thumbnail covers.

Keith Robinson wrote:Do you fancy having a go at that, Ian? I like what you've done and it should be fairly easy to adapt.

I'd be happy to have a go at doing that Keith. Now that I've got the hang of this Javascript malarkey, it shouldn't be too much of a problem to come up with a working demo... eventually!

Keith Robinson wrote:Anita, your idea of having related books on the same page is a good one too -- a very good one! -- and I think this could be fairly easy.

I wholeheartedly agree that this is a good suggestion by Anita - I'd particularly like to see the short stories that derive from a particular series of novels (e.g. the Famous Five)added to the end of the relevant index page in the Novels section.

Keith Robinson wrote:Anita, your idea of having related books on the same page is a good one too -- a very good one! -- and I think this could be fairly easy. We could have a section that says "Related books" or something, which just grabs anything from the database that contains the keywords "famous five" or whatever. Something along those lines anyway.

Sounds good to me, and I think Ian is right that it would also be of benefit to have related short stories listed on the index page for each series.

Tony Summerfield wrote:What I don't terribly like is the highlighted version of the first four going to a second line. Is it possible to move the listing left, flush with the images, as I think this would rectify this problem.

It all looks fine on my browser so perhaps you've rectified that now, Ian?

Tony Summerfield wrote:Playing devil's advocate, I am wondering what this would look like with a book that has only got one reprint, such as Girls' and Boys' Circus Book?

That's certainly something that needs to be taken into consideration.

Some very helpful suggestions here - the Cave of Books is an invaluable resource and it's important to make it as user-friendly as possible.

Anita