Let me know in the comments.
11:25am Update – things went very late last night, so this is still a rough draft. There’s lots of tweaking to do, and we’re just getting started on that. Thanks for the feedback!
– Okay. I’ve made a few changes based on Kate’s requirements. A few things though, captcha stays. It will help eliminate the 20/hour spam comments that SDA got on a regular basis. When we have that many spams, we don’t even look at the spam comments to decide if batb’s (as an example) is clean because the url had the word ‘ban’ in it. We just delete them all. So, the captcha will help you too.
See below the fold for up to date changes.
Cheers,
lance
– I eliminated the Movable Type registration option as the email system is borked. You can still use the other major ID providers.
– We’ve moved to blacklisting services on domain/IP’s and Typepad anti-spam as well as keywork lookups, link counts (>2 gets flagged) (looking at you maz2) and standard IP banning. The previous setup of Akismet + keywords + IP bans wasn’t robust enough. This improvement should reduce proxies (read: trolls) and known spammers.
– Some wonky layout issues have been resolved.
– I’m going to work on the left sidebar disappearing issue. It’s all stylesheet stuff with div’s and spans so it’ll take me a while to find the comfortable middle. The old SDA was table based and that was horrendous to edit. FWIW, the sidebar removing itself is sold as a feature so that the main column stays available to the readers without side-scrolling.
– Changes will continue until Kate is happy. To that end there are things that aren’t ever going to change. SDA will always be black on white. We may add some whitespace here and there or a rule but thats it. The general layout you see is what it will always be. Consistency and branding are important, they won’t change.
– Please have some patience with us. Our end is completely different too and we may have some errors (moving to a rich text editor rather than html) for instance. It’ll take a while to get all of the surprises out of the way and to learn the new work-arounds.
– moved the target=_blank to the the main index and archive pages only. Removed it from the html head template. Should reduce all the extra tabs from clicks on the entry pages.
– Removed duplication of the blogroll
– Caching most of the stuff now. Will be slow for the first loader, but after that is only one lookup and a page serve.
– Yes, Black Mamba, the del tag works now.
– re: the captcha. Users signed in with one of the ID providers that SDA supports (see the sign in link above the comment area), don’t get the captcha image.
– Down to 19 validator errors. Vast majority are from links in posts that use a ‘=’ or a ‘&’ in the url. Embedding Youtube and Twitter also clog the validator with non-valid XHTML.
– Search function now works _very_ well.
This is just a test
No problems here …..
Left side bar looks ok now, but the body is coming up in a larger font than usual.
Small note: when I activated Windows Media Player (to listen to, you know, a bit of Nat King Cole, or Toby Keith, or some such), while running SDA, my remembered information dropped out. I run Firefox 17.0.1. Might be me, or it might be SDA. Thought I would report it.
Otherwise, I’m in WOW mode. Haven’t been on (before 22:00 ET this evening) since about 09:00 or so. I liked it all this morning, but we evidently live in a post-12/21/12/11/11 world now — and for the better! Congratulations and thank you: if only the Province of Ontario could make an IT project happen like you guys can!
Not to be a prickly pear but a few times when I’ve typed in the CAPCHA letters exactly, it has refused to upload my message and has given me an error message instead.
Just throwing it out there.
Thanks for making the fast change of opening every link in a new tab. As others have pointed out some web browsers will destroy a partial comment when one switches to previous tab (not Firefox though).
May have to create a new persona which will allow me to logon without using captcha (which I still hate). Hate it so much that if I was unemployed I’d work on a project to create an OCR engine that would read captcha codes and feed them to a bot. Fortunately for captcha, I now have no free time for such projects. However, if captcha solves the problem of posts getting caught in the spam filter, I can live with it until Loki gets a sign in account on a service that has terms of service he can agree with.
Just found a bug. If ones visual system fails the captcha test, then no new captcha window shows up to allow one to try again. I got through using the preview funtion.
Sign in??
What I miss?
Not a problem,
but the temperature map on the sidebar only shows conUS. This one of NorthAmerica shows it better:
http://www.findlocalweather.com/weather_maps/contours/640x480_currents_nam_temperature_i1.png
Looking better… MY only complaint is the font size for the “Posted by” line is quite tiny relative to the body text, but maybe that just forces me to pay attention to the comment, not the author… 🙂
“…change for its own sake is not a positive IMHO”
Apparently. Win98, eh? 😉
Feels snappier today. 🙂
Two comments …
1) The grey sidebar to the left of each comment resembles a marker for quoted text. It’s kinda distracting. 2¢
2) Comment submission is still very slow at my end. Hoped that this would improve and cut down on multiple posts in the comments.
… and two questions:
1) Will a mobile-friendly version be offered? (Although, I must say that the new site doesn’t choke my BlackBerry like the old one did. Yeay! But it’s really tiny, still, and hard to read on the go.
2) Is email reply notification even a remote possibility?
Thanks Kate and Lance. Great work!
Site looks great
Fire fox 17.01 Windows 7
This is just a test, which I will likely fail.
Okay, I failed! Now you have proper email and proper “name” to be used.
Hey! Larger font’s a plus! I’m happy … 🙂
I can get used to the new site, not a problem except the font is very thin and my poor old eyes have a little trouble reading it as well as the old style.
test
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