Day: June 2, 2017

Holly Kai Park – more changes!

Posted on by Inara Pey
Seanchai Library: coming to Holly Kai Park

As I recently blogged on the Holy KiaPark blog, but will repeat here in sort for those who may not read that blog, we’ve announced two new things at the park over the course of the past week.

The first is a light-hearted attraction, with the arrival of bumper boat at the park 🙂 . The boats come in two flavours – those for just mucking about on the water and bumping one another free-form, and those for playing a team game of Bumper Buoy.

Bumper boats at Holly Kai Park

In both cases, the boats are free to use, and can be found at the Bumper Boat Pool on the west side of the park, near the Pavilion live events venue (you can reach them via the park’s teleport mirrors).

Those wishing to just putter about on the water can rezz a boat from the Bumper Boat rainbow rezzer. This will assign a random colour and number to each boat. Simply jump into the boat, select your seating size (adult, child or TD for Tiny), and off you go – use the ARROW keys for movement forward / back / turning.

The Bumper Boats Pool

If you visit the park with a group of friends, you can have a game of Bumper Buoy. This features two teams who select either red or blue boats and goals, and then try to push a yellow marker buoy into the other side’s goal. The first team to achieve a pre-determined number of goals wins! Full instructions can be obtained from the giver board under the Bumper Buoy scoreboard.

However, the big news for us at Holly Kai Park is the announcement that Seanchai Library is in the process of becoming a part of the Holly Kai Park family!

The Library, one of Second Life’s oldest spoken word programmes in Second Life, now in its tenth year, is currently moving into now accommodations in the south-east corner of Holly Kai Park, which has been re-landscaped for them. A new headquarters building is already in place and is being furnished, and Seanchai will be switching their weekly programme of events there from Sunday, June 25th, 2017. The new facilities can be reached by foot along the park’s trails (follow the Seanchai signs!), or via the park’s teleport mirrors.

Seanchai Library, Holly Kai Park

The move is a natural progression for Seanchai Library, who have been hosted by the Community Virtual Library (CVL) at Bradley University since 2010. However, it doesn’t mark the end of the Seanchai Library / CVL relationship – both organisations will continue to work together on projects in the future. Rather, it marks the fact that both organisations are moving in new directions and facing new opportunities.

For Holly Kai Park, the move is a further natural evolution in our relationship with Seanchai Library, who have been a part of the Park’s activities since 2016, organising and running the Stories at the Park afternoons which form a part of our Art at the Park events (themselves resuming on June 24th). They also hosted a Halloween round of storytelling at the Park in October 2016, and were participants in the recent Filling the Cauldron event.

Seanchai Library and Holly Kai Park

You can read more about the move in the official press release, and we’ll have news on Seanchai events and activities on the Holly Kai blog as the new season opens. For may part, I’m delighted to be able to welcome Seanchai Library to the park, and I’m looking for to working with Cale, Shandon and the team to bring Voice events to Holly Kai as a part of our drive to support the arts in SL.

SLurl Details

Holly Kai Estate is rated Moderate.

Giving the blog a face-lift

Posted on by Inara Pey
The new banner – displayed on opening the blog, with latest posts displayed below it

It’s a bit hard to miss, but yes, I’ve made a change to the theme underpinning this blog. It’s by no means a permanent change – that depends on the feedback I get. However, there are a number of reasons why I wanted to change things a little, so I’m hoping readers will prefer the new layout.

  • A lot of effort has gone into the menu system, but it was always a pain to use with the “old” layout, as it was locked to the top of a page – scroll down too far and it would vanish off the top of the browser tab
  • Some readers stated they found the old layout difficult to follow, with the sidebar on the right seeming to “run into” the body text
  • It didn’t loan itself to viewing on mobile devices that well
  • I wanted to tweak the text a little and (hopefully) make it easier on the eye.

As the changes are template-based, it is possible some pages / images in this blog have gone a little sideways in places. I’m working through everything to double-check (unfortunately, the preview option in WordPress doesn’t entirely match the actual page layout, so I could only start checking things once I’d made the change to the new format. Ho hum). Please make allowances if you come across something that looks awkwardly formatted on a page in the meantime 🙂 .

The thing I’m hoping will prove most useful is the menu, which will now following you down a page as you scroll. Given I’ve put a fair amount of time in trying to categorise and track articles and pages in the blog via the menu, this will hopefully make it far more reader-friendly than has been the case in the past.

The menu bar should now move down / up the page as you scroll through this blog

I’ve also revised the default body and headings text font – again, my hope is this improves readability and comfort when browsing. Unfortunately, one thing WordPress won’t let me change is the use of block caps for headings; this is locked into a CSS I can’t access, but I how the use of caps in titles and headings isn’t overpowering.

Finally, this theme had a better set of style sheets for mobile devices. I’ve no idea how many people read this blog from the tablet, etc, but (with the possible exception of the menu, which is a bit “ugh!” on tablets, etc.), it should make for easier reading if you do.

As with the last major restructure to this blog – in 2012, can you believe?!), I’m offering a little feedback poll for those interested in letting me know quick thoughts on the layout

Poll closed – see the update here.