August 12, 2006
Please stand by
Posted by pete at August 12, 2006 10:20 AM"It's in Revelations, people!"
I'm making some cosemtic changes here at APCB...actually esteemed blog host Michael is making the changes, and I'm trying to make sure I don't screw up them up. Things may look a little hinky until I get around to straightening everything out.
UPDATE: I'm pretty sure I've got the blogroll updated. If you link to APCB, please make sure I've reciprocated. If not, gently remind me and I'll take care of it.
Normal operations will resume shortly.
What’s not to like, Greg? Specifics. Yuck cannot be fixed, but “I can’t read black on gray” can.
Also, I am thinking of getting the stylesheet changer from Making Light, which looks easy-cheesy to implement, so that Pete could have an “Emlo-Styling” stylesheet with muppets and a “non-muppet” stylesheet without.
I fear change. Somebody, please hold me.
Comment poster goes above the comment, in text larger than it is now. Dateline can stay where it is. Border goes around the entire comment, making it absolutely clear what belongs to this comment and what belongs to the next. Comment attribution and dateline in same background color as comment.
In other words, what Making Light and the Whatever have done, and Making Light did it more successfully; the Whatever’s colors are slightly suboptimal in some fashion.
I do want to point out that the blog looks awfully bajiggidy in Mozilla. It’s all squinched up on the left side. I apologize in advance if that is what it’s supposed to do…
Fuzzball: I don’t have Mozilla, but I do have FireFox, and what we were aiming at was “how do we force the width to be 805 pixels across no matter what?” That’s what I see in FireFox on Windows and Mac. If that’s what you’re seeing, then that’s what it’s supposed to do. If bajiggidy means something else, let me know. And use FireFox!
We added “How do we get rid of the godawful comments and trackback windows, how to we merge comments and trackbacks into one list, and how do we annoy the snot out of Greg?” as bonus features.
Wait—the whole text-is-mashed-and-1/3-is-just-white-space thing is intentional?
Fuzzball:
Yeah, it’s based on the same code, but it’s usually an older branch.
Thing:
Maybe. It depends on what you mean by “mashed”. What do you mean? The 1/3 is just white space thing is on purpose. The width of the front page made the side bar slide down to the bottom on browsers that weren’t wider than 800 pixels, so we wrote the code so that the width was fixed. We chose 805 pixels, because it fits well on lotsa screens. The downside is a fixed bar of empty whitespace, which is grayspace on my screen on the individual pages. Some research does suggest that columns with too much text are harder to read. You don’t want people to have to move their heads, IIRC.
By “mashed,” I meant that the left 1/3-ish of the screen is text, the middle 1/3-ish is picture/calendar/etc, and the right 1/3-ish is blank space. The most recent post was an eyesore; granted, the writer of the letter in said post didn’t seem to be familiar with the concepts of the paragraph and/or the page break, but….
As long as it’s a matter of design aesthetics, and not some Mac-vs-PC-vs-Firefox-vs-Explorer compatability thing (which could also be read as “pissing contest”), I’ll adapt.
(To take a page from our host, I’m reminded of this exchange:
“…What right do you have to complain?”
“As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.”
“What? They’ve given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them.”
“Worst. Episode. Ever.”)
OK, good. I was hoping that was what you meant, not that “the left 1/8 of the page was really compressed text with letters on top of each other”. So, while I have opinions on Mac vs PC vs FireFox vs Explorer, they have no place in web design, which should answer those questions “yes”.
As to the text width, it would (now) be easy to put in a “doublewide” menu item that would let you see 900 px in the first frame instead of 550 px. or some such change. Up to Pete. I may do that on the test page, just for shits & grins and because I should be working on, y’know, “work”…
If you link to APCB, please make sure I’ve reciprocated. If not, gently remind me and I’ll take care of it.
Alright, you’re gently reminded.
And I’m not crazy about the comment format either. The alternating blocks of gray and white might be triggering some undiagnosed epilepsy in me, too. Ack.
I am nothing if not accomodating. Try the dropdown selector at the top (assuming it shows up)…
Oh, and I added a new dropdown selector to the new test page, allowing selection of “recent comments”. This is for my benefit, so that I can look at it and see where there are new comments without having to scroll through the main window.
I will throw a few cents in here. I remember when I was workin with Dreamweaver that you could set you the code for various sections based on percentage instead of fixed numbers so that no matter what the user’s screen resolution it would fill the screen. I am not sure if this is possible, but it also may rectify some of the problems when you increase the font size the sections get all wonky (at least it did in the old version). Also, the comments box stretches outside the boundaries of the other comments, and looks like it actually is closer to filling my screen. Good job on the redos and thanks for putting up with sniggly comments like this one.
One last fix: I set it up so that the style cookie was blog specific, which only affects people who read both APCB and my blog, a set of which I may be the sole member.
Pete, are you about ready to promote test.html to the big time, or is there more to be done?
Oooh I like the change in the comments format already…