Chip off the old block

Note! This page contains tables. One of the poorly-written rules for the pages on this site is to keep tables out of them, but they are included here for illustrative purposes.

Enough with the dialogue. Fun, though.

(Full disclosure; I swiped this wholesale from a friend of mine, and I think it rocks. It might not render quite right here, because I may not be doing sufficient CSS magic, but it should look passable. His site does do sufficient CSS magic, to a wonderful end.)

I don't think this sort of thing will work with this site as the site presently stands, though.

Another of those (pesky) poorly-written rules is that the site should stick to one column. This confinement makes things much easier to manage, completely obviates the need for tables (for page layout, anyway), as well as all of the crap I'd need to generate to fill in the other column(s) (I get ahead of myself - see below).

So. If I wanted to use this kind of calendar, where would I put it?

I could put it over on the margin, in it's own column (with the calendar being the blue box, and apologies to the actual blah.com):

...but that would make the page list to the side, somewhat. I could keep that from happening by applying a spackle of more content above and below to fill out the column, but I'm never going to get a pile of static content to line up consistently with the dynamic content that's going on in the main columm, so there's going to be a healthy chunk of whitespace someplace, a great deal of the time. I don't want that (a minor thing, possibly, but I don't). Another matter is that the footer (backmatter? bottommatter?) might be miles away from the end of the dynamic content, and I don't want that, either. So: not on the side.

(I suppose I could come up with a way of randomly (machine-) generating just enough content for the side bar to nicely cushion the calendar on the fly, but that sounds like it might hurt. Less so that it might work. But it might!)

I could put it at the top:

But I really like the way the top of the thing looks at the moment, and a calendar of the size of the first example (and one can't really make it any smaller) would crowd what I have. And I don't want that, either.

How about at the bottom?

Well, sure, except that if the dynamic content bit is huge, one would have to scroll all the way down to get to the calendar, and this sort of thing should really be accessible in the first screenful. Also, I wouldn't be able to center it (too damn big and boxy to look nice when centered) so I'd have to come up with static spackle to fill in next to it. Granted, it's a lot easier to come up with that kind of spackle (static number of lines, down at the bottom so who cares what it says, etc.), but still.

I don't want to use spackle, and I don't know where to put it, and I still don't want to use tables.

Maybe I need another kind of calendar.

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