Since my attempts to design a new menu for Inventing Situations and Wasting Precious Time have met with mild enthusiasm at best, I’m throwing the floor open to you guys. I’m a programmer, not a designer, and I figure at least one of you must be a better designer than I am or know someone who is.

The winner gets their work used on a popular site and a credit well below the fold. (The whole idea is to reduce clutter. I could hardly give you a headline before the gallery even starts, could I?)
Here’s my usual long-winded rules:

• Entries should be sent as text files to menucontest @ lustforlunch.com by September 15th, 2006.
• Soon after the deadline, an approximately one week polling period will be opened here. Entries that don’t meet all the requirements will be included in the polling at my discretion.
• The submissions should consist of html & css (and limited javascript, see below) only.
• The voting page will feature the menus filled in with the same content seen on the first two examples on the current sample page, along with screengrabs from Firefox.
• The contest is for the design of the menu only – I will be determining the actual links and categories, and writing the code to populate it. Anybody wanting to add their input on these subjects is welcome to, but that’s separate from the contest.
• The main (only?) difference in the menus for IS & WPT should be the colors defined in their css. (They should of course work with the css files already in place on each site.)
• The design should not rely on javascript. It’s ok to use it, but the user experience should not be complicated if it’s off.

Thanks in advance!

Has it really been a month? More? Geez.

Anyway, it’s time for another Round Robin — #13 in fact! The way it works is, each person chooses and captions an image and inexplicably something resembling a story emerges. We know, it’s amazing. Modern science is baffled.

If you’d like to participate, be sure to sign up by Sunday, August 20. We’ll start bushy-eyed and bright-tailed on Monday, August 21.

Sorry, new pictures for WPT will have to wait until tomorrow. Brain fried. I know you’re all crushed.

Edit 7/31/6: Huzzah. Two new sets, one from The Magic Sword, as seen in MST 411 plus the usual random fun. Get to writing, you.

Just rolled out a few bug fixes to WPT:

• Made it much harder for a different version of the story to be published than the one seen on the preview before publishing page
• Fixed some weirdness in how quotes in the title of stories would be handled – leading to “garbage” characters in the title text field or long titles being truncated at the last step. (They’re still truncated, but as soon as they’re submitted. Progress!)

As always, let me know if you see any bugs introduced with these changes, or any bugs period. Unless I get some improvement requests soon, I’ll probably stop tinkering around with the WPT & IS programs real soon and turn my attnetion to other site projects.

It’s like 11, but one more so! Round Robin #12 will be starting soon, so be sure to sign up by Sunday, July 16. The marvelous storytelling will commence on Monday, July 17. Fun in ways that ought to be illegal in more states!