Different interior designer.
Oh! Trackbacks and site search work again, too.
We invite your comments as you move around the new look. We've cleaned it up, and leaned it up for your road warriors and slow-adopters - but it's just electrons, so nothing is set in stone.
We should be compatible with most browsers, we've added all the bookmarking widgets, and added some functionality to the comments. I'll leave this up top for a coupla days, just to catch people when they come by for their first visit since they left work last Friday...
I'm sure something is broken. Let us know when you find it - or break it.
BTW - the comment and permalink buttons are now up with the title of the post, vice their old location, under the post. Just so ya know.
Y'know, problems. Like the character that shows up.
Pardon our dust as we clean up the paint drips and sawdust.
Sorry about the problems with the , John. I think the problem was cause by me changing some character handling settings in the backend while you were still writing your post. Hopefully, things are working now.
I'm sure you'll let me know if they aren't :)
BTW, for all comment posters. The little-blue-squarish-icon on the top row of the editor, one icon from the right. If you click on that icon then the editor will expand to take up the entire window. I find this infinitely useful for getting a good look I what I am writing.
1) Never had any problems with any interation of the site stylisticly.
2) Don't like that it automatically double spaces in comments on hitting enter, so far. That might make things more intelligible later though. We'll find out.
3) Don't like that comments no longer come up in a small 'screen in screen' window without right clicking. That was one feature I really liked in all the previous iterations.
4a) Don't like that *every* post now goes below the fold. Some should. Some shouldn't. SOmething's lost now that they all do. My stuff since it's wordy as hell def'n needs it but stuff like the Joe Hogan reports from Iraq should be seen in full on the main page, imo. The looks like 100 word cut off before going below the fold really means we unpaid types are going to have to start using 'hooks' and 'leads' to get attention, and that's just crap. I liked being able to set my own number of paras before going below the fold. Maybe that's still there in the writing side, but everything I saw on the main page itself doesn't reflect that.
4b) Really, it doesn't really show which posts we're emphasizing. I think we should have that capability on the main. Funny stuff or the everyday stuff sure, even then all you have with the H&I is the preamble showing, but big stuff like Unka Bill's Postacard's and major stuff is going to get short shrift. I remember when Barnett told his audience how he wanted stuff sent to him. I thought it realy arrogant at the time, but now it makes sense. People are lazy and really value their time, and so making them go thru one more step to get to the good stuff seems like a bad move to me. But whattaIknow? I have no real sense of aesthetics and I admit that.
5) Like the new tools bar. It'll take some playing with to get used to, but it looks a lot more usefull than the last one.(Now, could we add a spellcheck function, please? Yipe!)
And, again, never had any problems with any of the other iterations. Don't know why you're changing Boss, but I don't have to since I'm unhired help. ;)
Sometimes, Ry, ya just need to change to freshen up. This has mostly been a tech catch-up. All the aggregation sites, fixing the back office,making things faster for dial up, etc.
But I don't care for some of the same stuff you don't - we'll tweak it. We could have just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking but at some point, you just need to go public and let people break it.
It's not like it's an OS or something...
"June 23, 2008" Yesss, I'm two days ahead of myself here; but leery of looking back.
Cheers
Like the new clean style, will have to play with it all a bit to see if I hit any glitches. I really like the editing tools - they look like the edit tools in Word, so that should be fun :-) Colorful words, I just can't WAIT till Unka Bill gets a hold of it ... Heh!
Why that impertinent Spell Checker ... telling me "Heh" isn't in the dictionary. We'll have to teach it some words to keep up with this gang!
Seriously, John & Wesley - it's looking good so far. Very readable colors and clean styles. Onward and upward :-)
Well, so far it isn't remembering my personal info. Could just be that I'm weird though, Wesley. Being on bargain budget ISP sometimes does weird things. So if everyone else is fine I wouldn't worry.
The posts are easy to read, but the black on grey of the right side bar isn't quite cutting it, imo. Hard to pick out some of it. BUt that could jsut be the way I've configured my monitor, so, again, if everyone else is fine don't mind me. And the Veteran's mental health stuff is important enough that it should be flashing neon sign if needs be, neh? Everything else seems fine to me. It'll just take a little getting used to.
Thanks for the heads up on how to better utilize the stuff from the writing end, Wesley. Much appreciated.
I just can't WAIT till Unka Bill gets a hold of it ... Heh!
So, stop moving around...
Well well this is the final then. Damn fine. It certainly loads faster so very much faster. Less clutter too.
Can I do secret words?
We shall also see if there's the usual 5 minute delay before a comment is posted.
Black on grey Ry? I see black on dark green and it is all a bit squinty I suppose.
I'm with Ry on the spacing issue.
Hmm personal details remembered let's see that too.
Let's roast Ry and feed him to the moat
monsteraesthetically disadvantaged being.List is a tad buggered it needs the break I think. preview is buggered, at least for me. It shows the preview just fine but doesn't carry the code over. Let's try again. Hmm odd magic preview was fine this time. How odd no grey in the dictionary. Ageist! At least I spelled most of it right for once.
WSell done Mr Peck, now you get all our whinging and even more work.
I was toying around with the idea of using the tannish background color of the main column as the text color of the sidebar column. This should give a much better contrast (it is what is done right now for the comment header which shows the commenters name and the time of the comment).
I just wasn't sure if that would be too much tan for one web page (though the last design had a lot of all one color). Let me know what you guys think. Its easy to change so we can try it out for a bit and change to something else if you don't like it.
Hmmm - ditto on the personal info, had to type it in again. I'm happy with the black on green for the right, even with bifocals. I keep the res pretty high (1440 x 900), which makes even the small characters pop on the page pretty well.
Bill - I thought you liked lotsa motion??
Wow! Very nice.
Can I compliment this design without implying that the previous one was a putrid piece of crap? I thought so.
Only suggestion, the top part where you talk about the rules, make it a slightly smaller font so that it isn't the entire screen when you arrive.
Great new look. I've been hating my own look forever now but I haven't got the smarts to redsign it beyond uploading premade templates.
John, as in all things, change is part of maturing. The site appears, more "squared away" or neat, therefore more efficient and faster. I grew up in the shadow of my Brother and my Father, their I.Q.'s were both in the top 1%. Now you take a site like this, a group of concepts come into play. 1. "It is very simple to make something complex, but very complex to make something simple." 2. "The more fancy the site, the more there is to go WRONG." 3. This one actually builds on #2, if ignored, we now have the "perfect storm" for Murphy's Law. To understand this, my Father was a machinist, who actually designed and built the machines by hand. His favorite paraphrased version of Murphy's Law was this- "When you are installing a custom made piece on the machine and you drop it. There are 3 things that shall occur. A.) The custom made piece shall come to rest in the least accessible place. B,)This custom made piece in its present least accessible place, will also cause the machine to jam and break down. C.) It will also cause major damage to this custom made machine." I think you have passed that test. One thing, when it comes to tweaking, make sure, they are your own.
Gentlemen, WELL DONE!
Bill - I thought you liked lotsa motion??
[to see Bill's reply, kids, highlight the space between the bracketed sentences and then change the letter coloring to mauve]
Yeah, but chasing you around the room isn't my idea of foreplay.
[so, how'd it work?]
Bill - that's just because you're feeling old enough you're worried you couldn't catch her.
Unless she let you.
Chuck - absent a better solution, I'll probably put most of the disclaimer into the bottom of the post, with just enough to explain it on top.
I just tried a smaller font size - while it shows it in the editor, the template isn't allowing it. We'll see. I'll go face-to-face with Wes tomorrow and we can sit around the machine poking and prodding.
...you're feeling old enough you're worried you couldn't catch her.
It's not *that* so much as she keeps dodging toward the gun rack...
Eh, I come here more for you than your formatting. And as John says, sooner or later, you gotta stop tweaking, and start using. That's how you find out what works and what don't.
Looks great guys!
Very nice new look.
BUT! Whoever coded it thinks that nobody uses MAC in either Safari, or Firefox.
**Sigh**
Bill
Lesse here. The system remembered my info just fine, so that's cool.
info: WinXP Pro SP2, Firefox 2.0.0.14 (no, haven't upgraded yet), 1024x768 rez.
I like the current colors; IIRC the beta used some hideous low-contrast combo similar to what's seen on the " | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)" line. Black on very light khaki looks fine. Also like the new wider "main post" text width. The font size somewhat large to me, but I may be in the minority there. The full-screen comment toggle is excellent.
I do miss the "John, Dusty, and Bill" grafs from the earlier version. Do you intend to cycle all three versions of the page header?
Whoa. I was checking an old version of the blog on the wayback machine, when the above-mentioned page header changed from the cannon to the Hog image. It seems to change when I click on it, when I click refresh, or both.
Dunno if it's my screen resolution, but I see a healthy 1" or 1-1/4" margin on both sides. This impresses me as wasted space. Do you have that set as a number of pixels, or percentage of the screen?
Also, what blog engine is driving this place?
P.S. Going to see how quick this saves...
P.P.S. Even after using Preview, my info is still retained. :)
...Took about a minute and a half to save the above, which is actually quicker than before. :)
Yep, it's me again. :) Just upgraded to Firefox 3; thought I'd test out Argggh!
Firefox 3.0 is MUCH faster on page-rendering. For this particular blog, I can't say if the new Gekko engine made a difference, or if Wesley tweaked something, but it seems a bit more legible now.
There is, however, now a VERY annoying trait when I press <Enter> (and I undestand that counts as a paragraph break) the whole bloody page jumps around so that the new line is at the bottom of the comment pane.
Jeez that's bloody annoying! :(
It doesn't happen when I toggle "full screen" edit on.
Interesting. My post came up under the old format, then kat's post showed up in the *new* format and mine disappeared.
Now *kat's* has disappeared.
However, I posted the Meme, as required, ry and XBradTC actually *saw* it, so I revealed my innermost soul *and* got off a John-sized snark at Cassie -- and got away with it!
Win-win!
There was a comment by "Bill Smith", about using Mac with this site. I am using an Intel iMac Aug 2007 version, w/ Leopard OS X 10.5.3, using Safari, vs. 3.1.1 (5525.18) w/ 20" screen. I don't have a problem with your set up, but I also have 20/20 vision according to the optometrist. The blocks for your Name, Email Address and URL is 3/16ths of an inch in size. This appears to be the same size as your font for your text. Now, it appears that these boxes are actually fields on a data base record. The problem is this, when all of these different computer systems open this "Leave a Comment" section, they use a smaller font size that will fit into those different fields. You might want to increase the size of font,field boxes and input to the whole "Leave a Comment" function. You could even design it to appear in "What you See Is What You Get" and then limit the size of the comments to a certain number of words. It would help us learn to be more more concise. It would be helpful to some of the older vets. - Grumpy
Change is good. Thanks for working so hard on this!
change looks fine.
one minor quibble: site is now missing the quote from Reginald Abrams. gotta have that posted!
Still a problem for me. I have fire fox. I think that problem came from while I was putting an entry in the system. While I was putting the entry in, it looked perfectly fine. However, when I previewed and then posted, still those nasty little marks showing up.
does anyone else see it?
Looks awesome, may need to do an upgrade ourselves.
My .02, the site looks great! The fonts are easy to read.
However, I also get the "&bnsp" thing. I'm using Vista w/ SP1 and IE7.
Testing.....one.....two.......
I could never get the old site to remember who I was, so that's a non issue.
Sidebar reads better today for some reason........
New digs work for me.......and my "scroll wheel" thanks you........
Hmmmm. Ry, what are you using for a browser?
Each post also has its own RSS and Atom comments feed. For example, you can take a look at this page's comments by clicking one of the links under "Feeds for the Castle" in the right sidebar. These feeds are per blog post as aposed to the whole website comments feeds above.
This should make it easy for those who like to use news readers. You can subscribe to see when any new comments are added to the site or subscribe to a particular post that you are interested in.
It's all that FOIA paperwork sticking in the gears...