Viewing this booksite
I recommend viewing this booksite on a computer, laptop, or tablet. It uses Bootstrap styles for responsive viewing, so everything works on a mobile phone, but the limited space makes everything a bit less elegant.
Navigation
The sidebar navigation (to the left of each page on a computer, at the top on mobile, and below Contents) is available on every page, and presents the booksite as a traditionally ordered book or website, in the ordered I intended it to be read. To hide the sidebar navigation pane, click the Nav toggle at the top of the page. Each poem & interlude and all the frontmatter & backmatter also includes Previous & Next buttons at the bottom of each page.
The top navigation has a dropdown called Collections. There, the various interludes are collected into logical groups: one page consolidates the recipes, another pictures, and one page links to series or broad categories of poems (poems about masculinity, poems that are apologias, poems from the Note to Self series).
Next to Collections, the Give dropdown has links to donate to me (PayPal) or support me (Patreon).
Search
Tom's theme (the template I built this booksite on) includes search, but I disabled it because my page-level frontmatter includes key values with HTML markup, which breaks the JSON file that configures the search. Whoops! I would love for the booksite to have a search feature, but don't think it's a huge deal that it's missing, since each poem includes related links, and there's a Poems by Category page to group like poems.
I might try to implement more robust search after the 1.0 release, but not likely.
Multimedia
Poem audio
Each page with a poem includes an audio file of me reading the poem (though not any of the interludes).
I used the audio element, which uses your browser's default media player. I didn't create a custom player or style controls because that seemed hard.
Pictures
Some poems & all the invocations include pictures of significant people & places. The Collections dropdown in the top navigation links to a gallery of these (and other) pictures.
Playlist
The top navigation has a link to a Spotify playlist for this book. It's a collection of songs that are important to me, inspired some poems, I listened to while writing, or that might pair well with the poems. They're not ordered in any way, so I recommend starting Shuffle.
Some songs might be unplayable. This is because they're by artists who either:
- haven't uploaded their music to Spotify, like local Nashville bands.
- formed & broke up before Spotify existed, like songs from the various stages of my dad's career.
He's been called a real-life Dewey Cox by people who are not me.
Poem features
Tooltips
Any green text in a poem means you can hover over it with your mouse to reveal a short description. I didn't want the tooltips to be a distraction or necessary to understand the poem, so they're fairly limited, and contain no links or lengthy explanations.
Tabs
There are two tabs below each poem:
About this poem
Notes about where the poem came from, inspirations, & other digressions. If the poem was previously published, the name of the journal also appears here.
Related poems
I tagged each poem with one or more keywords to group similar poems. This tab creates a list of poems with the same keyword(s) as the poem you're reading.
There's no Love keyword because they're all love poems.