New Site Discussion

[Jonathan Capps]

Ok, so let’s move all suggestions / issues for the new site here so I can gather everything in one place and give you all a bit more information on what I’m adding in and what’s planned for the future.

Unread comments – Never fear, this is currently my top priority, although it’s proving to be a massive pain in the arse. The old site ran on Drupal and one thing Drupal does as part of core is log every user’s page visit in the database, meaning that information than then be used to show new comments since you last visited an article or forum thread. I only realised in the hours leading up to launch that WordPress does not have this, so the only plugins I’ve found are cookie based and that’s not a very nice solution. It’s very likely I’m going to have to write something myself to solve this, so if you could bear with me a bit that would be great. I’m sorry this was overlooked, because it’s the one big feature everyone was obviously going to miss if it didn’t carry over.

Category nav – Currently the top of page shows you all the categories so you can easily move between them to find what you’re looking for. There are plans to expand on this significantly, so watch this space. In the meantime, though, I’d be interested to hear any feedback you have about the site’s navigation so this can be taken into consideration.

There are also various little changes that have been suggested and I’ll be fixing little bits and bobs as we go along and I’ll try to keep you updated in here. Feel free to re-state any suggestions for us to consider. The main two things I changed yesterday were comments based:

Edit Button – Now you can edit your comment through a nice pop-up. You have this option for 15 minutes after you’ve posted a comment, after which you’ll be locked out.

Reply functionality – Before if you clicked ‘Reply’ next to a comment it would just take you to the reply box. Now, it will take the content of the comment you’re replying to, wrap it up in a blockquote, and stick it in the reply box to make quoting someone a little easier. It’s something I added on a whim, so feedback is welcome.

That’s the basics, anyway. On the whole people seem to like the new site, which is gratifying, but the re-launch is an ongoing process so I’m keen to improve on the site in the future.

Topic

[mick]

I’ll check it on the Dreamcast later in the week ;)

[Jonathan Capps]

That should be interesting, especially if the browser supports stylesheets. If it does things could get very messy.

[Seb Patrick]

Can someone test it on RISC OS?

[mick]

I’ve sold my Archimedes sadly, I can fire up one of my SGi machines and test it on IRIX if you like ;)

[si]

Just spotted the new home page pagination.Very nice. Also good to see the Users Onlne list return, like an old friend. :)

[Jonathan Capps]

Once again we edge ever closer to actually having the same functionality we’ve always had before.

[Pecospete666]

Great, Links even work for me! :)

[mick]

Honestly Pete, you should try the site on a an Apple Macintosh in 1bit black and white, it’s glorious.

[Pecospete666]

How about a Timex Sinclair Z80x!

[mick]

Yep, grab the ZeddyFox browser.

[peepingsignal]

Is the site currently loading very slowly for anyone else or is it just me?

[peepingsignal]

Is the site currently loading very slowly for anyone else or is it just me?

EDIT: Oh dear, I posted twice. …erm…WHAT’S THAT BEHIND YOU!?! *runs like greased-up wind*

[mick]

All fine for me.

[Carlito]

Yes, noticeably slower for me today.

[Ben Paddon]

I’m having some slowdown, but then I’m also downloading [SOMETHING PERFECTLY LEGAL] at the moment.

[Pecospete666]

What happen to peoples Curriculum vitae? or CV?

[Jonathan Capps]

Might’ve just bee a temporary issue with our hosts (we’re on shared hosting so some slowdown every now and then is expected). Anyone still having problems today?

In other news, something new has turned up on the home page. Hope you like it.

[peepingsignal]

It’s been a bit slow this evening (or morning in UK), but it was fine earlier.

[si]

Ooh. New highlights picture bar thing. Liking that, Cappsy, nice.

[Pete Part Three]

Very nice. Would be good if it was always there, showing highlights of that particular area of the site.

[Jonathan Capps]

Very nice. Would be good if it was always there, showing highlights of that particular area of the site.

That’s not a bad idea, actually. I’m a bit conscious of space, so opted to reduce it down to just the nav when you’re looking at archive pages, but there’ll always be ways to improve it so I’ll keep this suggestion in mind.

[mick]

I may be alone in this, and it’s pretty trivial but I’m really missing the sidebar login box.

[Pete Part Three]

I’d agree that it’s a *slight* nuisance to go to another page to do it. Also, I often don’t realise I’m not logged in.

[mick]

Yea I keep doing the same thing, it’s laziness on my part really as I just dive in without looking at the top links.

Perhaps a little welcome script indicating you’re logged in…

[mick]

I would also like to request a harem of Vietnamese prostitutes and the moon on a stick please Mr Capps.

[Jonathan Capps]

Sorry guys, I’m not ignoring you, I’ve just had an exceptionally lazy weekend sitting on my arse playing Half-Life 2.

Basically, I’m loath to put anything else in the already over-stuffed sidebar. HOWEVER, I do realise the whole login situation can be improved and I was thinking of doing all of this:

* Greatly extend the session expiration time to cut down on the amount of times you need to login
* Make sure the site redirects you to your last viewed page after logging in, rather than dumping you back on the homepage
* Possibly restyling the account nav a bit so it stands out from the rest
* Play some more Half-Life 2 and pretend it’s 2004 again.

[mick]

Oh Cappsy, dont you know all the cool kids are still playing Counter Strike 1.6 ;-)

[Somebody]

Something screwy:

[mick]

The homepage is mega-slow loading for me from home and work, but I’m guessing thats due to the traffic?

[Jonathan Capps]

Something screwy:

Oops, it seems to be including unapproved comments in the count.

[Jonathan Capps]

The homepage is mega-slow loading for me from home and work, but I’m guessing thats due to the traffic?

I think so, it seems to occasionally have a fit but it’s loading ok for me, now…

I’m gonna have to look at some solutions for next week, because the site was fucked on Thursday.

[Ian Symes]

Cappsy is currently busy playing his computer games, but prior to this, he updated the slider thing on the front page, so that the first thing you see is the four most recent bits of non-news content, followed by the individual categories when you click through. Note the colour scheme.

[mick]

Was that slider of your own coding Mr Capps or was it modified from one already available? I’ve been after something very similar.

[Jonathan Capps]

I wrote it from scratch because I’ve been doing about a hundred of these things at work recently. I’d be happy to send you my awful code for it if it’d be of any use!

[mick]

I’d really appreciate that, I’m far too busy coding, re-coding and re-coding again for my sites sodding search function at the moment.

[mick]

mick at segasaturn dot co dot uk by the way ;)

[Jonathan Capps]

Righto, I’ll clean it up and deliver it to your inbox tomorrow!

And after we’ve finished I’ll send you over the slider code.

[mick]

I’m lubing up in excited anticipation.

[mick]

I thought it important to let you know that G&T is also
working faultlessly in DOS on my old NT box, on which I am
typing this very message.

[mick]

Although sadly I had to do it through command line in NT4 as opposed tu pure dos so i could screenshot, my camera didn’t like my old CRT…

I hear someone wrote a BASIC web browser for the spectrum… that could be a giggle, BRB.

[Jonathan Capps]

I hear someone wrote a BASIC web browser for the spectrum… that could be a giggle, BRB.

The fact that people are doing this gladdens my heart more than I can say.

[Tarka Dal]

Well it’s Speccy > C64 ‘ennit… Ah. I joke of course.

I have a request. Is it possible to develop your webs so that clicking on ‘xx new’ on a topic thread takes you to the first of the xx new messages?

[Ian Symes]

Erm… it does.

[Tarka Dal]

Curious.

Just tried it in Firefox 16.0.1 and it went to Mr Capps face up there /\ rather than yours down here.

[Jo]

Works fine for me in Chrome Version 22.0.1229.94 m and also in Firefox 16.0.1

[Tarka Dal]

Didn’t work on that one either. Strange. Oh well if it works for everyone else maybe it’s some weird Uni access issue.

[mick]

Working fine for me on firefox, chrome and dolphin for android.

[Tarka Dal]

I think I was just jabbing the buttons too hard.

[p2p_productions]

Cappsy, FYI – my most recent comment on the GHOSTWATCH thread looks a bit fucked up. Don’t know why, but I couldn’t add two > comments on one response (only one came up) so I responded to Jo and Danny individually, but I’ve just noticed that half of one reply seems to have encroached onto the other and of course, there’s no edit option anymore to try and correct. Weird.

[HelloMabel]

What about 2 or 3 shades of grey, as it were, for a text block within a text block? I’m getting kind of mixed up by these replies to replies to replies in the episode discussion threads.

[Author]

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