User blog:NoGround/Communication and Design

So there where a couple of things I wanted to get done today that I mentioned in yesterday's blog, but I haven't gotten around to them yet. Why, you ask? Well, I needed to communicate with others! There where a couple of things brought up today:
 * Excessively long Reference Lists
 * Excessively long and unorganized Skill Lists on the Stats pages

Both requests happened in the morning, and both requests where handled in the afternoon. Sometimes, though, work takes longer than you might expect. It's always a good idea to think of how long something might take you, and then triple that time before giving an estimate to anyone. Time really isn't a factor here, but it did take me most of the afternoon (even though I took a nap).

Priorities
So, my list of things to do (which is separate from the To Do List) is set on priority scaling. Most immediate are things that other people mention that they don't have the ability or skills to do anything about, or if they do, shouldn't be changing unless they know exactly what I've done and what they're looking at and have communicated with me about it. Next are things that I want to do that only I can do, followed by things I want to do on the To Do List, followed by things that need to get done that others can do as well. This is a personal policy of mine due to my knowledge and skills in User Experience Design. Communication is the most important thing. Without it, everyone is unhappy, arguments happen, and people are left feeling frustrated and slighted. It's not fun, especially when you have multiple people in a collaborative effort, each with their own vision for whatever the end product is. That's why others' requests and feedback is the most important thing to me. I'm not perfect and others aren't either. Taking criticism and building off of it are extremely effective skills for growth in a skill-set and as a person.
 * Basically
 * 1) Others' Requests
 * 2) Things only I can do
 * 3) Things I want to do that others can
 * 4) Things that need to be done that others can

Handling the feedback and requests of others
So sometimes I miss things or ideas don't pop into my head about certain things that others can see. Tea-ra, one of the admins here, asked me to create a collapsible box for the Reference List. As an aside, Reference lists are actually not that common on fan wikis like this one, but we have it either way. Anyway, I didn't think anything of it, but the suggestion got me thinking of a way that we could create a collapsible list that didn't effect the layout of the page too much. Viola, we now have the Template:Reference Box. It's extremely simple, but it looks great and still uses the appropriate HTML header tag  .

The other one has kind of been on the burner for a while, but only really was able to come into play now that I got the normal stat templates done (Characters and Monsters). Chu brought it up again, and so I decided it was time to get into action. Now we have the Template:Character Stats Extended (Monster Stats Extended pending...) and embedded in it is the new Template:Skill Section. Embedding it took a bit of trial-and-error. I was trying to embed the Skills Section in the normal Character Stats template under the "skills" tag, but that wasn't working, so I embedded it in an entirely new template. Not ideal, but it works and it looks good.

That covers about everything today. Tomorrow, if nothing more pressing comes up, I'm going to handle the Navbar pages. Characters is on the way, but I still need to do the System, Monsters, and Locations.

~Bye!