Unfortunately yesterday was a busy social day (a rare one), and today I had to catch up on work, so not much work could be done on swarmf. However, I did get one key thing done: the clippings sorting on each swarm topic. This allows you to organize items wherever you want them.

This is an image of my test swarm topic a few days ago:

You can see that although each column has the same number of items, the height distribution isn't the same - I was struggling for a while on how to handle this technically. Then I realized I should just let users sort them visually!

Today's screenshot:

The beauty of scriptaculous made the whole process so easy! You can even drag items from one column to one another. Right now each page defaults to 2 columns - I want to let users pick up either 1 column or 3 columns in the future. It'd be nice to allow users to set the width of the columns as well, but I've set a minimum width for 800x600 resolutions and a maximum width on the content to 1024 (I hate content that stretches too wide); the 1024pixel max will probably render 4 column designs useless.

Right now you can only speciy columns to go vertically, but it'd be really nice in the future to allow for horizontal columns as well. And maybe even let users style each block in their own way - people could really create a nice looking magazine-esque front pages!