Yes, I’m playing around with the layout
DMZ · September 1, 2008 at 8:47 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Please do not panic.
And, as always: patches welcome.
Update: a L/R column update is coming.
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54 Responses to “Yes, I’m playing around with the layout”
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The world around me fell apart for a sec.
Needs some formatting work, but I like it. Even looks good on my SmartPhone due to the sidebar stuff all moved to the right columns. It would be nice if the comment numbering came back though.
Patches welcome.
I like the clean look. I do fine that the blue bars with the headlines not being in line with one another is visually diconcerning.
Be happy to provide some, just let me know how/where you want them submitted.
and it was a tad disconcerting when it happened mid-edit
I like it. Good job, Derek.
I think I like it, except having side bars on both sides would be better than both on the right. Though, I’ll get used to it either way.
Oh, but please bring back comment numbers.
Don’t forget to try the layout with dancing pink ponies, WFB, and Burger Chef.
Comment numbers aren’t really that useful; it hasn’t happened as much with the lower traffic, but comment numbers are subject to change as posts magically appear or disappear.
*shifty eyes*
It’s much better to blockquote the post you’re referring to instead, or address the person by name.
I like the new layout; I can actually visit the site on my Blackberry which makes the geeky part of me very very happy.
I was never a big fan of sites that had both bars on the same side. For a blog it really doesn’t matter, as long as the content is readable, but I find the balanced look more appealing to the eye.
Not to mention there’s a big-ass margin over on the left that isn’t doing anything.
Minor nit: It would be nice if your sub-head (“Seattle Mariner and baseball analysis with David Cameron and Derek Zumsteg “) had a line break somewhere other than in the middle of Dave’s name. Like before “with”
It would be sort of cool if you could move the entire contents of the “Disclaimer, Copyright” down into the footer (the two right sidebars would be almost the same length), but I expect that’s asking too much.
Also, what is up with the new icon (used in tabs and the address bar and favorites/bookmarks, etc.) An “R”? What is that?
Major nit: this layout’s mostly fixed-width, so if your browser’s wide, you’ll see white margins to the far right and left.
Minor nit: patches welcome.
Favicon: it’s just a byproduct of the theme. NBD.
This layout works WAY better than the previous version to view on my phone.
I prefered the sans serif fonts on the former one though, or am I dreaming?
We could use post numbers since we reply to and slag each other so much on game threads.
And, smart phone readers would love to dump the right side columns all together in a game thread. It would cut down on bandwidth too.
It would?
Aiieee! There’s absolutely no left-side margin at all on my Safari 3.1.1. The headers of the posts go smack up against the edge of the browser window which is extremely disconcerting.
Hey! Cycle!
It looks good on my Safari test, though if the window’s too narrow, sure.
Hrm… yeah, I guess some margin introduces itself only if my window is full-size. But I never have it that large. I guess no other web site I look at has a fixed-width section that floats in the middle of the available area.
For a second I thought that this site had gone the way of Prospect Insider. Speaking of which, whatever happened over there any way?
You might try inquiring with Churchill. I’m not sure you’re going to find your answer in a site info thread about USSM redesigns.
Nice work guys..it looks great on the iPhone…
I dig it.
I agree with Joser on the odd line split with Dave’s name. Obviously not the biggest of your worries right now, but for whatever it’s worth. I spend a lot of time at work dealing with page design and trying to clean up weird breaks on headlines and other such big type, so that stuff probably jumps out at me more than others.
And I probably missed something, but what happened to the buttons that allowed easy links, blockquotes, italics, etc.? Was there some fatal flaw? It seemed like a good idea.
Good luck with the redesign.
Looks nice, but I’m with everyone else on the “both sidebars on the right” and the comment numbers, for what it’s worth. It kind of made commenting unique!
Actually looks pretty cool, but I miss the comment numbers a bit, too.
2 columns on one side is hard to scan. Agree with the comment above about wanting ordinal numbers in the posts. Also wordpress generally sucks on the Blackberry browser these days, some javascript includes makes the browser hang. I know there’s nothing you can do about that, though. But any extra CSS work you can do to WAP the blog would be great.
Very minor nit pick: I would prefer the link to the comments thread be placed at the bottom of front page stories rather than the top. After reading a USSM encyclical, it would be more convenient to be able to click over to comments without scrolling back to the top of the post.
of course, the comments re-number if the thread has been modified by the mods …
Good work so far, but you can make it better, I have faith
Not sure if I’m the first to say this, but I liked the old theme more at this point. This one feels too much like something you’d see on Blogspot.
I like it looking a bit cleaner than it used to, don’t get me wrong, but this particular setup lacks personality, and at least to me feels like something a teenager would throw up to chronicle his collection of Pokemon cards.
As for the tweaks like the linebreaks and browser size issues… couldn’t you have done a local test on your computer before publishing, and checked each browser at several screen resolutions to make sure something like that wouldn’t happen, or at least not look bad like apparently it does to some? That’s something I did a lot when I was making websites a few years back. If you did, my apologies. I do know that there’s only so much you can catch without others pointing out flaws
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I only have one suggestion. I’m viewing on a 19″ widescreen monitor, and all the text is in the middle, with tons of whitespace on each side. Coul you modify the CSS of the main column to grow a bit more if it’s available? Maybe use a percent screen width, with a minimum in pixels? My CSS is a little out of date, so I’m not sure that is possible, but I seem to recall doing it.
Patches welcome!
I like it. It’s simple and classy.
When you mentioned that you wanted to reformat the look I was afraid it would come back trending toward new! zazzy! grafixxxtreme! But it looks like my fears were unfounded. Basic is good. Flash is annoying and overrated. I come here for the content, so I’m just looking for a layout that isn’t a distraction.
My two cents: I prefer comment links at the bottom of posts and like the column-content-column layout (I’m a sucker for symmetry and, luddite that I am, read USS Mariner on a regular old home computer so I can’t speak to mobile browser issues).
Patches forthcoming, but not being a wordpress guy and having previous patch submissions disappear into the ether a little guidance on what method/format the patch should be in and how/where to send it would be useful…
I second the request for comment links at the bottom of the posts instead of the top. It’s more natural to find them there, since one comments after reading the post, not before (in theory), and it also helps set off the posts as separate entities with readily identifiable beginnings and ends.
I have the same issue as Loren. Here is a screen print:
http://tangotiger.net/temp/ussm.jpg
The red-line I added, and it appears at horizontal position 0px, so you can have a reference point.
I have Firefox 3.0.1 / WinXP Pro. Also tried with IE 7.0 to same effect. This is unlike all the other sites I visit, including my own.
Since you’re not using the 468×60 ad space in the header, you could edit the width to make the site description fall in one line.
line 92 .headerleft – change width from 350px to 600px
line 106 .headerright – change width from 600px to 350px
I’m on a mac, so I’m not sure how’d that play with IE, but I can’t imagine it messing up. I’ll find my copy of this theme and try playing around with the css today.
Another big advantage of comment numbers: if I’ve spent a lot of time reading a thread, and hit “refresh”, I instantly know how many additional posts have come in, and have a very good idea about how far up I have to scroll to continue reading the new posts. Time stamps are much less efficient at that because they count elapsed time, not the number of new posts.
Yes, I’ve seen the comment numbers change, and seen my and others’ references to “Comment 42″ or whatever become misleading when Comment 42 gets replaced by the erstwhile Comment 43. But one adjusts quickly and shrugs. That’s a minor inconvenience compared to the big convenience of being able to count posts and even “navigate” using comment numbers (meaning, I use them constantly while scrolling up and down and figuring out where to scroll to or scroll back to). It’s a heck of a lot easier than trying to remember “Joe Schmoe’s post at 7:47am”.
Adding to my 12:08 comment: aesthetically I overall like the cleaner look. But functionally I think it has the two big negatives that people have been mentioning: the loss of comment numbers, and having the comment button at the beginning rather than at the end of the article.
Also I’m still not getting the block quote and other handy formatting icons. For me they disappeared … I forget, maybe a week ago? I.e. it’s presumably a separate issue from the redesign issue.
The comment button plugin stopped working with the new WordPress version. I have no idea how to fix it.
Is blockquote working at all?
[edit: evidently, yes.]
I like it better with no comment numbers. Comment numbers allow people to be lazy in replying to comments, and force other people to scroll back and forth, even when the numbering doesn’t get screwed up. There’s no harm in quoting at least a sentence of what you’re responding to — if it’s not obvious from the context — and it has the advantage that people are generally more precise when responding to an exact quote.
Well, if the comment button plug-in gets fixed, a “quote this comment in reply” button might help people wean themselves from numbers. The problem there is that quotes (which people will tend not to edit down to just the appropriate bit) make the page longer, so the load on the server will be greater when lots of people are reading and posting. Though you should generally not allow temporary (hopefully) hardware limitations dictate UI design decisions.
“I like it better with no comment numbers. Comment numbers allow people to be lazy in replying to comments, and force other people to scroll back and forth”
But will eliminating comment numbers actually cause people to increase their use of quotes when replying? Even WITH comment numbers, it is very common to see replies which don’t cite, quote, or even mention the original posting; instead the reply simply says something like “yer right” or “yer nutz”, or at best they might say “I agree with LPiniella”, which still forces the reader to scroll (and without the benefit of comment numbers to navigate with).
My argument for comment numbering isn’t about replies – it about navigation. Unless your someone who sits and presses refresh every 10 seconds the numbers are useful to see what’s changed (and how much) in a thread for the less “persistent” readers.
My argument for comment numbering isn’t about replies – it about navigation. Unless your someone who sits and presses refresh every 10 seconds the numbers are useful to see what’s changed (and how much) in a thread for the less “persistent†readers.
All of the comments are time-stamped. There are never so many comments in the same minute that you should need a better way to figure out where you left off.
numbering is crucial for dialog.
great new layout though – always good to have some change!
“Crucial”?
Honestly I’d be pleased to see comment numbers never return, if only because it’d mean no more “oops, I was supposed to be replying to #44!” posts.
Really, just type the person’s name or blockquote their post. It isn’t that hard.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU The new layout works great with my MSNTV2! I can read the comments again without having to copy and paste them into an e-mail (or read them in one-word columns that gives me a headache). It is very much appreciated. Thanks. Did I say that already?
numbering is crucial for dialog.
Phhhhhhhhhhhhbbbllttt.
I was in a chaotic meeting with a ton of people today and we all managed to keep the conversation straight without saying “#44 LOL #47 ITA”
By the way, I am testing this out on Google Chrome and it works just fine!
(I hope Derek doesn’t delete me for being off-topic!)
“All of the comments are time-stamped. There are never so many comments in the same minute that you should need a better way to figure out where you left off.”
See my comment made at 12:08 about how time stamps are a much less efficient way to navigate than comment numbers are. One example right here: that was 12:08 yesterday, and it was pm. None of that baggage is necessary if I could simply say see my comment #42.
Also, it’s not just a question of where the reader left off, it’s finding out, nearly instantly, how many additional posts have come in since they started reading.
9:07 “I was in a chaotic meeting with a ton of people today and we all managed to keep the conversation straight without saying “#44 LOL #47 ITAâ€
Was that a face-to-face meeting? Oral conversations are MUCH easier to follow than interrupted, asynchronous, text-only conversations on a blog.
I agree that claiming that numbering is “crucial” for dialog is an exageration, but the poster was clearly talking about coversations via postings, not oral conversations.
I think we’re arguing a lost cause MKT
I implemented comment numbers on my blog because of linking issues:
1. If I wanted to provide a link to someone to a particular comment, I could. I’ve done that quite a bit.
2. If I wanted to say “check out the thread, particularly posts 17 through 21″, I could.
If it was only for the situations intra-thread (responding to posts within the same thread), I don’t think I would have bothered. That said, I often do something like:
Rally/15: Good point. Maybe we should…
And I do find myself as I page up and down, using the comment numbers as demarcation points.
At USSM, there doesn’t seem to be much inter-thread linking, so that really takes out that idea.
As for reading new comments, I always go by timestamp, not comment number.