Scrippets

I’ve had some version of this site up and running [since 2003](http://web.archive.org/web/20030921223943/http://johnaugust.com/), when I became frustrated with how difficult it was to search through previous columns I’d written for IMDb. ((Remarkably, they’re still running these, even though it’s been years since I’ve written a new one.))

Unlike most blogs, ((I’m using “blog” in the 2009 sense of a series of short posts arranged chronologically, newest first. That is: a blog is a blog because of the way it’s formatted, not because of the content per se. It’s easy to forget that the term blog originally referred to weblogs, or online personal journals.)) many of the 1,000+ posts on this site are still highly relevant today. They’re answers to reader-submitted questions, and most of the questions haven’t changed. It’s often difficult to find these older entries, however, and the chronological blog format doesn’t help. I’ve struggled to find ways to make it easier to dig around.

The category archives at the bottom of (almost) every page are a start. Clicking on [Education](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/qanda/education), for example, will take you to a listing of all the articles in that category, along with brand-new summaries — most of them written by Matt.

Another option is what I’m calling [Answer Finder](http://johnaugust.com/answers), which takes all the screenwriting-related entries and groups them together in a much more browsable interface. It’s an experiment, and your feedback is certainly appreciated. Two caveats:

* There are known issues with Internet Explorer. In particular, the category box appears too far down the page. It’s a problem with IE’s box model, and if someone wants to grab the CSS and fix it, knock yourself out.

* Some of the older entries have weird formatting, particularly with [scrippets](http://scrippets.org), because the specs have changed over the years. One by one, we’ll be going through old posts and fixing them. But if you see something wonky, feel free to note the URL in the comments to this post.

For the truly curious, here’s how Answer Finder works. (You’re welcome to look at the source, of course.)

1. Getting both categories and posts out of WordPress is more difficult than you’d think, which is why I’m happy to have found the plugin [WP Categories and Posts](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-categories-and-posts/).

2. I hacked the plugin to make it generate DIVs for each category. ((When I say “hack,” I really mean it. It works because it works, not because I really understand it. PHP makes baby Jesus cry.))

3. With a [custom page template](http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages) (an under-appreciated WordPress feature), I used jQuery to hide the DIVs, bind the category menu and place a session cookie to help you come back to the same place when navigating away. ((jQuery, by the way, is awesome. It lets a barely-programmer like me leverage a lot of CSS knowledge. And I have new respect for JavaScript, which is more Pythonic than I was anticipating. Given the speed boosts in the new Safari and Google Chrome, I’m looking forward to seeing what ambitious ideas will be coming down the pipe in 2009.))

Let me know how the new page is working, or not working, over the next week. You may see periodic downtime or wonkiness while things get sorted out.