Site Changes

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 12, 2012

Filed under: Notices 176 comments

As I warned last week, I’m messing with the site theme. This post is here to act as a catch-all for feedback so that all of the various “WTF DIS SUX?!?!?!” comments don’t end up mixed in with the other threads.

One thing I really regret is that I never kept any sort of visual record of this thing. Back before video games ate this site, I had a lot more focus on tabletop gaming, and the site had a (embarrassing, crappy) Olde English styled title. The site was done primarily in yellow, of all things. This is the only image of the site to survive from the first four years. And for reference, here is what it looked like yesterday.

However bad today’s update may look to you, let us reflect on how far we’ve come since September 2007.

Also: I don’t have a smartphone, but I understand those are huge these days, even though they’re actually small. Someone mentioned the site has just a bit of horizontal scrolling on a smartphone. Anyone have any advice on how a web tinkerer like me can view or test how a site will perform on typical mobile devices?

I’m interested mostly in feedback on readability and usability. I’ve tested in Chrome, Firefox, and (saints have mercy) Internet Explorer 8. Looks the same on those three, which must be some kind of miracle. Let me know if anything is broken, hard to read, hard to find, or hard to use.

 


From The Archives:
 

176 thoughts on “Site Changes

  1. jalapeno_dude says:

    Archive.org is your friend… Here’s the earliest record it has of the site, here’s a version with the Olde English theme, and here’s the list of all versions. It claims to have 51 snapshots of your site, though presumably some of those are backups.

    Oh, and first, I guess.

    1. rofltehcat says:

      Damn, you were quicker than me. Love that archive site =)

      1. Gilmoriël says:

        The earliest snapshots I can find are actually from October 2001, though it says it has two of them only one of them seems to lead anywhere. Sometimes the links even work… I see a mysterious page called Pixel.Factory

        1. Shamus says:

          WOW. I searched and searched, but I thought Pixel Factory was gone forever. Actually, I guess 90% of it is. The wayback machine only has 2 pages of updates.

          Still, that was my blog from 1999-2001. Just amazing to see it again.

          Shocking how dull it is. I remember thinking how great it was, but it was this tedious personal blog about how I was feeling that day. Insufferable.

          Glad I improved.

    2. Chuck Henebry says:

      That’s a great find! I remember the Ye Olde style site, since I started reading during DMoTR. Amazing how much the site has changed since then.

      Keep the changes coming, Shamus!

      OH! and bring back the pen&paper discussions. There’s been some interesting news coverage of WotC’s plans for a new edition of D&D.

      1. CTrees says:

        Ooh… Yes, agreed. I imagine a lot of us have a lot to say about such things.

  2. Aanok says:

    Well, it’s pretty, that’s for sure. Love the post titles, with the subtle shadowing in the back.

    Maybe, though, the font you’ve used is a bit too “tall”, expecially for those “Category, Author, Date, Comments” thingies on top of every post. The small blue ones, I mean (“Notices, Shamus, Jan 12, 2012, X comments”, for this post). It’s not that you can’t read them, but it could be more comfortable, maybe with a different font or a bigger size.

    Oh Lord, I was reading through the archives and then
    “What Makes a Great RPG, Part II: 8. There Should Be A Bigass Sword”.
    I lol’d.

  3. Did you really want to link to http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/back_button.jpg as your “first four years” image? Because it doesn’t exist now.

    As for mobile: there are a couple good Mobile plugins for WordPress which automatically switch to a different, simpler layout if they detect a mobile browser (detection based on User Agent string). You would test that by having your browser send a different User Agent string, there are a lot of browser extensions to do that. There are other extentions that allow you to resize the browser window to a specific size, such as the size of a smartphone screen…

    1. sab says:

      Oh [deity], please don’t do browser detection. If you want to make a mobile website separate from the normal website, that’s all fine and dandy. But don’t shove it down peoples throats just because of their useragent.

      Relevant: http://xkcd.com/869/

      1. Shawn P says:

        Assuming it actually is set up properly, where it doesn’t shove you back to the homepage and there is a proper “See full site” button within easy access I still think it would be a net gain.

        1. Blake says:

          Considering Facebook doesn’t even get this right for me using the Android browser I have little faith in autodetecting mobile sites.
          Maybe just have the autodetect say “hey it looks like you’re using a mobile browser, click here to access mobile site” rather than a forced redirect.

          1. Jeff says:

            Agreed! I HATE it when a site forces me to their mobile version, which 75% of the time is crap and not what I want.

      2. CTrees says:

        Agreed!

        Also, on my Droid 2, with the default browser, I get no horizontal scrolling, unless I’ve zoomed in on the page.

        1. Wayoffbase says:

          The site looks just fine on Firefox for android too, no horizontal scrolling.

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    As long as you leave the mellow background,I dont mind the changes.

    By the way,why does help text miss the rest of the coding things?I mean sure spoiler one is the most used,but sometimes its nice to use the rest.

    Oh,and a suggestion:Could you give us a preview button?

    1. Klay F. says:

      *squeaky voice* Down with the heretic! Chaotic Evil theme forever!*/squeaky voice*

      Yeah, I know Shamus isn’t likely to ever bring that awesome theme back, BUT I CAN STILL DREAM!!!

  5. MDCore says:

    For testing smart phone designs, try just making your browser window quite narrow.

    Check out Smashing Magazine‘s new design. They handle a large number of categories really well, and they make excellent use of responsive design. Resize your window from large to small and you’ll see how it works.

  6. Scott Richmond says:

    Running Chrome 16.
    Full steam ahead with the unfiltered crit:
    1. The “This site is a labor of love by…” banner is way out of place – White flavored box over the top of the banner and blue background. No.
    2. Really don’t like the grey background. Never have. Realize its your thing though.
    3. Its time to kill the Verdana fonts you use in the post itself, its so 2005. Calibri please.
    4. Shadowed post heading looks…odd. I won’t say bad, but just odd – Literally nothing else on the entire site is shadowed.
    5. Really like the post sub-headings bar (Category, etc). Please keep.
    6. Really don’t like the blue bar banner things that are on the right menu. Very ugly.
    7. The comment system on this website really is no good at all. You have a strong community now Shamus. Please for the love of all that is holy build a comment system to contain it. I feel like if there are 80+ plus comments (Almost all your posts) then there is no longer any point commenting because the comment list is so huge. You need to implement some sort of reddit-style comment voting so the best discussion threads rise to the top.

    1. Shamus says:

      Improving the comment system is very, very tricky. What we have is what comes stock with wordpress. I could use plugins to extend it, but I’m wary of being at the mercy of a plugin author. If the next version of WP breaks comparability and the plugin author doesn’t feel like updating, it could cause chaos. I mean, if my dice roller plugin breaks I can disable it. It’s purely visual. But if comments are organized and threaded by a plugin and that plugin goes away, then entire threads can fall apart, display improperly, or vanish entirely.

      Then there’s the issue of performance. This site NEEDS to use heavy caching to work. Without it, I’d bring the webserver to a crawl. So any comment system must be compatible with Supercache.

      It’s a hard problem, which is why it’s been an issue as long as it has. I know we need threaded discussions, and I know we need to see “what’s new” in the comments since last visit. Voting up would be nice. Paging is a must.

      Sigh. It’s a big job, there’s lots of tradeoffs, and once I make a move in one direction it will be hard to go back. Which is why this problem has lingered. To me it looks like WordPress just wasn’t built with large blogs in mind.

      1. Drexer says:

        I have to ask that you do not add any sort of voting system for commentary, based on my personal experiences.

        From my experience such systems have always encouraged a rich-get-richer scheme of commenting which although might foster one particular conversation also stifles the potential for parallel conversations and diminishes the various discussions that might come from one single post. I feel that the simple chronological ordination is the best as it makes the readers expect a reasonable dispersion of discussion across the comments and thus making it so that the reader looks at more than just one discussion and frequently interacts in more than one.

        I do believe that the current system with multi-level threading and a reasonable number at such(the columns never get far too thin even in my 1024*600 screen) is well adjusted; although the only improvement might be a system similar to dreamwidth which holds comments for loading past the second level of threading with an easily accessible ‘expand’ button, but as you mentioned that might be beyond the limitations of wordpress.

        I do have to say though, that your blog is surprisingly robust and quick considerignt eh usual number of coments and that I usually have no loading or navigation issues either on my eeePC or on my Android phone. And this is coming from a person who suffers a lot with the inefficient and laggy loading of blogger blogs and has to switch to Chrome to check Moviebob’s blog quickly for instance.

        1. X2Eliah says:

          I’d like to second this regarding the comments – imo, the threading model we have now is sufficient, and the lack of voting/rating is a massive plus.

          1. Klay F. says:

            Yeah, anything that makes TwentySided even remotely resemble reddit can go jump off a building.

        2. Shawn P says:

          I also agree. A simple “Expand” button would be beneficial, though I think something that sets a cookie to say you want to “perma-expand” somehow would also be beneficial for the people who like to glance at all the side conversations. Sometimes the side conversations become really engaging in and of themselves.

        3. Abnaxis says:

          +1 on not wanting voting. All I want is something that flags new posts to make it easier to see what’s new since I last checked the comments

          1. Shamus says:

            “+1 on not wanting voting.”

            I laughed.

            1. Lazlo says:

              Voting can be a blessing or a bane, there are some sites that benefit from it, I don’t think this would be one of them.

              The one comment feature that I’d love to see is the ability to track threads. Some of the side-threads get long, convoluted, and highly enjoyable. Not having to go back to the page and find the thread would be super-convenient.

              As for theme and look… I don’t care. So long as it doesn’t get in the way of me reading the awesome, I probably won’t even notice it exists. Always remember, your website only needs to be pretty if the content sucks. You don’t have that problem.

              As for how the site used to look…. here’s an example.

              1. Dev Null says:

                +1 for the ability to follow threads.

                Wait, that isn’t even funny. Oh right, but I’d really like a way to follow threads.

                Among other things, I’m one of those people who feels a compulsive need to stick around for the conversation if I comment on something, rather than just jump down off my soapbox and run away. The current system makes this really hard. I have to go back to the right post, search for my username, scroll up and down (because comments can get added above your post in the same thread by being a response to someone who commented before you) to look for new comments in the thread, then flick to the next page of comments and repeat the entire process. Any sort of follow feature (email notifications, RSS, etc) would be wonderful.

                1. Lazlo says:

                  I do the same thing! The one solution I’ve found is that I have the “website” part of the reply filled in with my blog, which is fortunately so unpopular that no one ever links to it. So if I do a google search for backward links to my site, I get a nice list of everything I’ve ever posted anywhere. Hooray obscurity!

              2. tengokujin says:

                I highly enjoyed rereading Shamus’s thoughts on “Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na koto” (English title: “Someday’s Dreamers”, lit. “What is Important to Magic-users”), thanks. :3

                It really was a very mellow, thought-provoking show. I also loved the OP and ED songs.

                The anime was meant to be a partial adaptation of the manga, much like many other long-running series (Fruits Basket, Skip-Beat!) and the series name was meant more for an umbrella of concepts, the idea of that kind of magic in a world like ours.

                There are spin-offs subtitled, “Taiyo to Kaze no Sakamichi” (English title: Spellbound, lit. “The Hill Path of the Sun and Wind”) and “Natsu no Sora (lit. “Summer Skies”), of which “Summer Skies” got an anime out of.

                Rereading my post, I just realized that what Shamus got out of the anime is exactly what the Japanese title said it was going to outline. >.>

        4. Meredith says:

          I agree as well. I hate commenting systems that re-arrange them in other than chronological order.

        5. Blake says:

          I too don’t want a ‘top rated’ comment kind of system.

          I think just being able to expand/contract threads would make it much easier. If it was simply each level could be expanded (all except the top level being hidden by default) I couldn’t imagine that being too hard to disable if it broke as the hierarchy never changes.

          Also the headline having that drop shadow looks like it’s trying to be cool for coolness’ sake. It seems to be harder to read to me (my brain dismisses it as unimportant as it bends into the background) and it looks so….. WordArt.

          And the ‘k’ in “Links” over on the side bar on the right looks like a weird ‘R’.

      2. mike says:

        May I suggest Disqus?
        I don’t know how you feel about letting a third party host your comments, but:

        – It has all the features mentioned (and then some)
        – Good spam filtering
        – Can be configured so popular (voted) items filter to the top
        – Theme-able (may take a lot of work to theme it similarly to what you currently have)
        – Allows different levels of authentication, and authentication services

        It’s also used on a few popular websites. (You may have seen it around). EG; Wolfire use it.

        I feel all spamy… Sorry. :-/

        Good luck. ;-)

        1. Ingvar says:

          I can only speak for myself, but if I try to make a comment on a blog and it redirects to Disqus as the comment handler, I stop trying. I’ve had no ends of annoyance trying to Just Make A Comment to think they’re anywhere close to a sensible solution.

          1. CTrees says:

            This.

            I hate Disqus.

            My work computer hates it, and essentially doesn’t let me comment on any site using it.

            My phone hates it, and it’s a serious pain trying to leave comments via my phone.

            My home computer does just fine, if I “lower my shields,” so to speak, dropping the various protective Firefox add-ons for Disqus. That makes me uneasy, for a service that doesn’t function all that well and which I don’t generally like.

            I used to be super active in the comments on Topless Robot. Now I don’t post, because TR switched to Disqus, and it’s just too damn much of a pain to bother. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much I don’t want you to use Disqus, Shamus.

      3. Primogenitor says:

        I guess you could off-load all the comments to a separate site, such as a “proper” forum. Create a forum thread for each post, reciprocal hyperlinks, probably automated some how.

        1. Shawn P says:

          Another method for caching ANYTHING is to have the comments AJAX’d in by rendering them in a separate page (with no content aside from what is needed for the comments) and then having the AJAX-requested page cached itself. When someone comments, bust the cache on it. This would also speed execution time of the article loading as the comments can load afterwards. Should be fast enough that a simple “Loading comments…” text box should hold over the audience for but a moment while they load.

  7. zob says:

    there are free developer tools for smartphones including phone emulators. you can try one.

    1. danman says:

      I spent 2 years developing my company’s website specifically for the mobile devices. The fun part about developing for mobi is that they don’t all act the same or even similar. Especially javascript.

      That being said, look at your site metrics (if you have them) and see the most common 2 or 3 devices that hit your site and simply Google ” emulator”.

      For example, you could Google iPhone emulator and get something like this http://www.testiphone.com/ which is a browser-based emulator or something you download and install.

      You’ll be surprised what does and doesn’t work well and it doesn’t only have to do with the size of the screen.

      1. CTrees says:

        Very true on the mobile development. For instance, the Pathfinder SRD (d20pfsrd.com), will not allow for resizing on the Droid 2 (my phone). I actually got in contact with the developer (he posts infrequently on the Giant in the Playground forums), and apparently on the several other phones he’s tested the site on, including other Android-based phones, it allows resizing just fine.

  8. Velkrin says:

    I like the changes. Seems like the overall visibility on the site has been increased.

  9. X2Eliah says:

    Hmm. What font are you using for the title of posts? It looks …. misaligned, some letters are lower, some higher, the bottoms and tops just don’t align. Urgh.

    Also, I can’t really like the bold-font used for all the “this post has xx comments”, “January 12th, jadijadijada” at each post, because they stand out a bit too much.. Maybe removing the boldness effect would be nicer? On the whole, it feels as if there is more “whitespace” wasted between and among the comments now – the distance between, say, Velkrin’s comment’s end and mine’s start, purely content-text-wise, is gigantic.

    1. Wandring says:

      I agree, the titles look odd

  10. thebigJ_A says:

    Get rid of the title font. I don’t know if it’s the bad shadowing, or the pixellated letters, but it’s really, really bad. I mean, it looks fine for the smaller bits, but blown up for the main title, it’s actually unpleasant to look at.

    And white over blue in the bar up top? No thanks.

    Shouldn’t the “Search” button be up top, too, rather than in a separate blue bar just floating, unconnected to anything, on the right?

    One last one: way too much bold lettering.

    The main thing is the title font/shadowing. I can live with the others, but I may actually visit the site less if those stay. They hurt.

    1. Rax says:

      I agree with the title problems, you can basically count the pixels.

      btw. the white box would disappear if you turned off your adblocker, at least for me it did

      Edit: I’d like to see a smaller font size in general, more along the lines of the old design.

      1. CTrees says:

        Looks like he keeps changing the title font. I’ve seen three different versions, now (one fairly good, one TERRIBLE, one merely cruddy). There may have been more revisions.

      2. thebigJ_A says:

        What white box? I didn’t say anything about a white box. My ad-blocker is off. I turned it off for this site back when he made that post requesting people to.

    2. Bubble181 says:

      Agreed; the psot title is, at least in IE 8.0, really butt-ugly. The letters don’t quite align, their measurements are off…

      I’m personally not at all a fan of “strechted” letters in general, fonts with a height/width mismatch are jsut very unpleasant to read to me. I’m aware this is a personal preference, though.

      1. Bubble181 says:

        To be fair, now that I’m home: in Chrome it looks a lot better. At least the shadows show up :-P

    3. Tever says:

      Agreed. I liked the post title when it was smaller anyway.

  11. Overall, I’d say it’s an improvement. But for critique/suggestion:

    – The overall style of stretched text clashes with the more standard sized font that makes up the blog post themselves.

    – For a sleeker visual aesthetic, I’d change the prev/next and comment text into buttons rather than text link to give them more visual prominence. At the very least, you should still put a lil more space between prev/next text and and the info above it.

    Otherwise, looks fine ‘n dandy to me.

  12. Gravebound says:

    I think the post titles are way too big. It looked much better smaller and to the side of the image. And the shadowing is too opaque; it bugs my eyes, the same as bloom lighting in games. The blues pop too much, too “severe” compared to the white background.

    I honestly really liked the site the way it was. :/ (At least color/theme-wise)

    But that font size change is the big offender. I thought it was because I was still using Firefox 2.0 (because when I tried 3.0 it did nothing but crash on me) and that yours was just another in the growing list of sites throwing old-browser-users under the bus. So I was surprised when I upgraded to a newer version that it was still screwed up. :D

  13. ClearWater says:

    Looks ok on lynx too, except for the graphics.

    (Yes, I specifically installed lynx to test this. It had to be done.)

    1. noahpocalypse says:

      Um. I believe it is intended to be spelled “Linux”.

      1. Rax says:

        Um. I believe he’s referring to this:
        http://lynx.browser.org/

        It’s a text-based browser.

        1. ClearWater says:

          Yup, lynx, but I did run that on a Linux (Ubuntu) VM.

  14. Dwip says:

    I’m mostly a fan thus far. And oh hey, search results order finally matches archives order. Cool.

    Three more nits to pick:

    – In IE9, if you squish the window far enough horizontally, the top menu bar (About, Best, Ask, etc) breaks, and you end up with a light blue bar below the good-looking one that looks rather hilariously off.

    – New post title font is an improvement on the super tall squishy font, but maybe looks a little too happy comicish in contrast to the site header font? Sans serif definitely a plus, good height/width proportion definitely a plus, style could maybe use a bit more tweaking. I could live with this one though.

    – Many have already suggested this, but I’ll throw my hat in the ring for something better with comments somehow, and two things there. One, as cool as the comment-number-as-dice thing is, it’s impossible to actually read, especially with the translucent dice/multiple dice. Two, if you’re sticking with more or less default WordPress comments, keeping them threaded may not be the way to go. With multi-hundred comment threads, I pretty rapidly stop reading the thread (because it means re-reading the whole thread for new comments), and just start searching on my name. Taking out threading and adding readable comment numbers isn’t the absolute best way to fix that, but it’s probably the easiest.

  15. Lovecrafter says:

    Looks fine on Opera. I like the deep blue used for links and post titles. It really makes them stand out much more than before.

  16. Specter says:

    I hope this works (since when do you have to register at imageshack?!)… anway:
    http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/402/unbenannt1rpj.jpg/

    picture taken on windows/ff 3.6
    linux ff 4 has the same problem, just worse

    1. Zock says:

      Looks pretty much the same with Win 7 / Firefox 8. Not good.

      1. Shamus says:

        Here is how it looks on mine:

        http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/site_archive1.jpg

        I don’t understand why you’re seeing the font so big. I’m even setting the fonts to a specific pixel size (as opposed to the CSS “larger”) so we should all be getting exactly the same thing. Can anyone explain this?

        1. Rax says:

          I can’t explain it, but I can provide a third version:
          http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/9978/referencel.png
          Firefox 3.6.25 on my end, notice the pixelation.

          1. Shamus says:

            I hate web development forever.

            1. Rax says:

              Just to make you really upset:
              Same picture in Firefox 9.0.1
              http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/9316/reference1.png

              Edit: I guess, since Specter also uses Firefox 3.6 and it looks a LOT different from mine, and mine is the same in FF 3.6 and 9.0, it’s safe to assume, that (for whatever reason) the browser(-version?) isn’t the problem here. Don’t even ask me, how that can be.

              1. Specter says:

                http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/607/unbenannt2tg.jpg/ <- complete page for reference

                @Rax: that was my guess as well, but I can't find any plugin that might block anything here. I've disabled ABP and NoScript completely, but it doesn't make a difference.
                I've just checked on my 10" netbook (linux/ff7.0.1) and it's just getting worse…

                I'll try to screw around with the ff-settings on my vm to see if I missed anything…

        2. some random dood says:

          @Shamus’ image: Hmm, that does not look like a standard web-font used in the heading (and at the person who wanted “Calibri” as a font, not everyone has that font installed – especially those who do not use Windows). It’s possible that the differences in the screenshots are because the font is not installed on the device, so the browser is dropping back to its default font-family. (Maybe it’s a downloadable font, and the settings at the browser disallow downloading fonts?)

          1. some random dood says:

            Should have added: Could you please show the CSS for this? Maybe someone can then spot why there are differences.

        3. xKiv says:

          I think you are basing your measurements off a font that exists on your computer, but not on some (many?) of ours. And somehow auto-downloading that font is either disableb (security), doesn’t work, or just isn’t considered at all.
          (Yanone Kaffeesatz? Really?)
          For me, the problem is even worse – the Y in categorY and A in Author overlap. And the date value in the “date” column overflows into the “previous” row. Decreasing pixel sizes by 2px helps. (that’s the entry-meta-title and entry-meta-data css classes).

          1. Shamus says:

            Ah! That’s it. The font isn’t loading. I chose that font because it’s narrow, which solves all kinds of problems. Hm. I guess I could make ugly Impact an alternate.

            For reference, the font exists on Google fonts, and seems to download for most users. However, a few people can’t (for whatever reason.) I’m content if the site is UGLY for those people, but it should WORK.

            1. Specter says:

              yes, from a technical standpoint it works. But the missing font makes it hard to read some headers.
              not to be a burden or anything, but if you could pick a different default-font (the one that gets loaded when yanone doesn’t), that would be really awesome :D

            2. Abnaxis says:

              And the problem just….went away? The font loads fine now (though the text is still a little too huge for my taste, at least the words don’t overlap). I’m not doing anything different. I started sniffing around, looking for a way to download the font from Google and install it directly–maybe my system finally woke up and downloaded it for the page I was looking around at?

              God, I hate computer problems like this

              EDIT: Or I’m just seeing that “Ugly, Impact font,” which I’m sure you just finished implementing. Duh.

            3. Abnaxis says:

              OK, I also downloaded and installed the font permanently on my system. Direct download link from the site where I found it:

              Mirror 1

              Mirror 2

              Fonts complement of:

              http://www.yanone.de/typedesign/downloader/?name=Yanone%20Kaffeesatz&URL=http://www.schnellmussesgehenundbilligmussessein.de/fonts/YanoneKaffeesatz.zip&URLALT=http://www.yanone.de/typedesign/kaffeesatz/YanoneKaffeesatz.zip&task=downloadfile

              To install in Windows (I want to say it’s the same for 7/Vista as XP, but not completely positive), download the zip file and extract it somewhere. Go to Fonts under Control Panel, copy paste the extracted files into the Fonts folder that opens. The site looks much better with the right font.

              1. Zock says:

                At least on Win 7 you can just open the zip file with explorer and double-click the font. This brings up the font preview dialog, which includes an install button on the top. Click that (you need to provide admin password if requested) and the font gets installed.

        4. Zock says:

          I installed the font you’re using (Yanone Kaffeesatz) and now the texts are looking OK. The font you’re using looks ‘condensed’ while the default sans-serif is not. This is what’s probably causing the text to look too large and overflow the space reserved to it for many users. You should probably consider adding some other, more widely available condensed font as a first substitute for the preferred font before telling the browser to default to sans-serif.

        5. Specter says:

          Got it:

          It’s NoScript. You have to specifically tell NS to not block the fonts-object from googleapis

          this it what it looks like now:
          http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/201/unbenannt3wc.jpg/

          1. Abnaxis says:

            It’s doing it to me too, and turning off noscript didn’t help.

            It’s not just the post titles–ALL the not-body text is huge. It makes my eyes hurt. If I had just now randomly found this blog, I would immediately have left

            1. Specter says:

              click on your ns-icon and select “blocked objects”. there should be 12 entries for this site, simply allow “Font@http://themes.googleusercontent.com (http://shamusyoung.com)” and all should be well

              1. Abnaxis says:

                I have allowed absolutely everything on shamusyoung.com (the ‘Allow all this page’ option). The pop-up doesn’t even show up any more. There’s nothing else to enable.

              2. Sumanai says:

                Tried it, and it worked. Looked like this before doing it:
                http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6908078/TwentySided-2012-01-12-Firefox901.jpg

                @Abnaxis – Note that it’s not part of the “blocked site” list (what appears when you just click on the S) or whatever it’s called, but the blocked objects. I have the NoScript symbol in the corner all the time, so I can click it even if “nothing” is blocked at the moment. The list of objects disappeared however, which is annoying. I could be using a different version of NS though.

                Also I can’t remember how I made it so it’s shown all the time.

                1. Abnaxis says:

                  Actually checked my whitelist before installing the right font, and googleapis is on it. It’s fixed now, but only because I installed the font on my drive, not because the site worked.

                  1. Sumanai says:

                    Strange and frustrating. At least it works now.

          2. Shamus says:

            Excellent. Thanks.

          3. X2Eliah says:

            Yeah, same here, there’s nothing in my NoScript about googlefonts or anything.

            AND this issue is the same across Chrome, Firefox and IE9. Only FF has noscript. So there’s some other problem.

            I am puzzled why Shamus is using some arcane obscure font that only a select elite of users seem to actually see. Isn’t that sort of stuff against the basic principles of webpage-making? At least put some kind of ‘default to arial’ or something for us poor huddled masses who don’t get to see your hand-picked special superfonts…

            1. Abnaxis says:

              EDIT: Strike that, the fonts are fine in Explorer for me, so it isn’t an OS thing (though the banner does something funky under IE)

              EDIT2: Argh! I though strike-through text was implemented =

              1. X2Eliah says:

                I’m using Windows 7.

            2. Shamus says:

              In theory, the font should just download from Google. Not a bad idea. Such a system could allow for truly universal fonts. As opposed to “Impact on windows, Charcaol on Mac, and random-guess on Linux”. However, it seems that the download is failing for some people. Fine. Ideally, the site should work just fine without the font.

              Now that I’ve worked this out and I know I’m not dealing with some crazy nonsense with point sizes, I can disable the font for myself and make sure the fallbacks are working properly.

              1. X2Eliah says:

                I see.. Still, quite puzzling why the fonts are failing to load. For what it is worth, I’m using Win7 OS, and on all three browsers (IE9 with no plugins at all, Chrome without plugins, Firefox with noscript – disabled on this site, btw) the site looks the same, and on all three the “correct” fonts do not show.

    2. peter says:

      have you perhaps increased font size? ctrl+plus, and ctrl+shift+plus? it looks like you enlarged text while not enlarging the whole page.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        The font size is correct for the body text of posts and comments. Only the titles and headers are screwed up:

        http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m240/Abnaxis/comment.jpg

  17. Jarenth says:

    Two things. One, that blue you use for links now is very blue. I prefer the lighter blue of yesteryear, personally.

    And two, why’d you remove the standard line-up of HTML commands from above the comment box? I appreciate the ‘Thanks for joining the discussion‘, honest, but that command box was useful to me starting out as an Internet Talking Person.

    Beyond that, everything seems to be working just fine for me (Google Chrome, 12.0.742.100, for reference’s sake).

    1. Gravebound says:

      “And two, why'd you remove the standard line-up of HTML commands from above the comment box?”

      This. I will never remember any of them aside from bold and italicize.

      1. Shamus says:

        Ok. I’ll re-instate those.

        That HTML list was auto-generated, and looked like a big ‘ol wall of code. It was a list of everything POSSIBLE, not everything that a user might want or need. Some of the offered tags were very obscure. I think what most people want are:

        * Bold
        * links
        * spoiler tags
        * italics

        I should just make a block of text to describe how to do these. Any other tags you think people will want?

        1. Aanok says:

          Maybe strikethrough text?

          1. Irridium says:

            Also quote text would be nice.

            1. Jarenth says:

              I support strikethrough and quote, too. Strikethrough is a great tool for failed attempts at being funny comic effect, and I never ever got quote right.

              You could add underline, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use that. So this list works pretty well, thanks.

        2. CTrees says:

          Just as long as there’s no blink or marquee tags.

          Oh good, I think there aren’t!

        3. Dev Null says:

          I like the new version better than the old one. Sometimes, when I’ve been stuck working on a Windows box for too long, I forget which way the slashes go in close tags and have to trial-and-error it. Pick the non-web developer. Strangely, no matter what happens, if I’m in any doubt I get it wrong on the first try.

    2. Jarenth says:

      Actually, make that three things:

      Are you going to be making any changes to the index at shamusyoung.com?

      1. Shamus says:

        You mean the front page? I wasn’t planning on it. Does it need something?

        1. Jarenth says:

          Not really. Just wondering.

  18. Gamer says:

    I would say that some of the text is a little too big. The titles are fine the way they are. I kinda like how they are easier to read.

    But on my PC, the Category and Author texts are literally right next to each other without any sort of spacing.

    And I went back to watch the ME2 season, the link to the next episode is slightly completely over the comments link.

    Just a couple of little things I thought you should be aware of. Otherwise I like the new text.

    1. Gamer says:

      And now all of my concerns were addressed. Well done, Shamus.

  19. Shamus says:

    Testing:

    You can enclose spoilers in tags like so:
    Darth Vader is Luke’s father!

    You can make things italics like this:
    Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your father?

    You can make things bold like this:
    I’m very glad Darth Vader isn’t my father.

    You can make links like this:
    I’m reading about Darth Vader on Wikipedia!

    1. Fat Tony says:

      Oh great thanks, ruin it for me. God. *sigh*

  20. I don’t know if someone else has said this, but the new layout looks excellent using the latest version of opera.

    Also, since I’m using a mobile browser to comment, the site’s never looked that bed when reading from my phone.

  21. Dianne says:

    This is the iPhone simluator I used at work recently for quick iPhone tests, so I didn’t have to keep hassling other people to use their phones:

    http://www.testiphone.com/

    It’s a bit hard to get it to scroll. I usually select the text in the viewport and keep moving the cursor down to force it to do so. I haven’t been able to get the scroll=on parameter working.

  22. some random dood says:

    Is there a way to get screenshots to you? I think a picture is worth a darn sight more than a wall of badly scrawled text…. (Yes, several parts of the interface look broken to me – maybe because I have used the text enlarge feature in Firefox because I am getting old and the sight is not what it used to be?)

    1. Shamus says:

      email [email protected] ought to work.

      I’m looking for text enlarge feature on FF and I can’t find it.

      When a site has too much teeny text for me I tend to use CTRL-mousewheel. That expands the whole site, preserving the layout so fonts don’t start busting out of their assigned boxes.

      But the point stands that I need to do something about people who expand only the fonts.

      1. Rax says:

        Text enlarge is in View -> Zoom -> Zoom Text only

      2. Abnaxis says:

        ctrl+roll works in FF…

  23. Kdansky says:

    It’s still a bit too grey. Background is a flat grey, half the comments are a flat grey. If you add 30% brown to it, it would be indistinguishable from a cover-based shooter. I’d prefer a less gloomy white?

    And I’m still not fond of the narrow column for the main text which does not scale at all, making it too big on some mobile devices, and too small on a decent screen.

    1. Shamus says:

      What *IS* the default width on a mobile device? I think this site was designed to be 800 wide, which I thought would be pretty good for mobiles.

      1. Kdansky says:

        Forget about a default width. Every single damn device is different (I mean, any two iPhones have different resolutions, and there are hundreds of types of smartphones out there!), and this will only get worse. On top of that, resolution and screen size are uncorrelated nowadays. The iPhone 4S has nearly as many pixels as most 12″-13″ notebooks, but it’s only about 4″ across. Contrary to that, the Galaxy S2 has a significantly bigger screen (15% longer diagonal), but only 480 x 800 resolution, or about half the DPI. The next iPad will probably run at 300+ dpi too, putting it at 2500×1200 (or thereabouts) with 10″, which means anyone wanting to read a 800 pixel page would have to put it at 400% zoom. On a small device!

        You just cannot rely on any arbitrary standard. Reading stuff through google Reader has the incredible advantage that it reflows the text.

        As a bonus feature, all mobile devices can be used in two orientations. Yeah. Awesome for web design!

      2. Dianne says:

        If you’re making a fixed-width design, 960px tends to be the most commonly used width for the content container.

        If you’re aiming to make a responsive design that resizes according to viewport size, God help you. This is still being heavily debated and various solutions are still being explored.

        Andy Clarke suggests designing with a width of 320px and scaling up from there to known, commonly-used widths:

        http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/projects/320andup/

        There’s also the Golden Grid System, which I’ve been eyeing for a while. I’ve been trying to find an excuse to use it so I can determine whether it’s robust enough for production use:

        http://goldengridsystem.com/

        I’ve had a quick look at the original version of the Sandbox theme you’re using as a basis and it doesn’t seem to be a fluid layout. However, there are some examples on the plaintext.org website of other minimal themes which are fluid.

      3. Rick says:

        I like your headings, they’re great.

        The default width on mobile devices vary. One of the worst thing some developers do is lock the width so you can’t zoom. It’s horrible.

        I don’t know about iPhone users, but Android users are lucky. If you zoom while looking at a page then it will zoom in so everything is bigger then text-reflow kicks in and narrows the column of text. So everything is bigger but the column of text is shrunk in width for the screen.

        Screw it, here’s pics.

        Zoomed out on Android

        Zoomed IN on Android

        Landscape view on Android

        You can see text-reflow has narrowed the text, but pushed it against the left edge. Purely cosmetic, doesn’t break the experience. The site works great, I was just pointing out something small.

  24. Destrustor says:

    I do agree that there were some functionality issues with the old design, but the visual part was perfectly fine. I don’t see the need to change the graphic design. It was sleek, efficient, and professional (or serious and/or accessible, I don’t really know the word I’m looking for here). I never felt there was any reason to visually change the site. And I like the mostly grey background. It’s neutral, less aggressive than pure white and less oppressive than most other colors.

    And now I sound like a grumpy nostalgic old dude. Things were better back in my days! GET OFF MY LAWN!

  25. Moriarty says:

    While the new font looks ok for me on top of an article, try looking at your archive.

    The titles are way to big, you can’t even have three article headers on screen at once. screen:
    http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/9453/bild1pw.png

    also, the blue bar on top with the “About the Author” stuff in it looks a bit too massive now.

    I just noticed another thing, if an article has more than one category, the second one can get pushed below the comments line, as seen in my screenshot

  26. Raygereio says:

    Still get the non-appearing adds in IExplorer 8.
    http://i.imgur.com/ekHND.jpg

    If you still get revenue from it, I reckon it’s a non-issue.

  27. Infinitron says:

    I’ve found that there are a lot of oldschool nerds who, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this comment, don’t “get” smartphones.
    Thus, ironically, the sites of the most technologically-savvy people are precisely the ones that tend to not support smartphones properly.

  28. Fred says:

    Unfortunately, large chunks of brazilian’s IPs still get the “403 forbidden” error :(
    I have to use the iPhone Pulse in order to access the site, and the formatting is ok.

  29. Aesthetics aside, which is a debate I don’t want to get into, I find the new title fonts to be hard to read. Certainly this is a downside on a reading-oriented blog.

    1. Mephane says:

      Exactly my thoughts. It is not that the new theme is not pretty (it has a touch of a Star Trek font to me), it very well is – it’s somehow tough to read. Like walking barefoot over soft sand and then the ground gets all spiky. But it’s definitely not just the (maybe just seemingly) increased height of titles, it’s the very shapes of the letters somehow.

      I am not even sure if the font is all that has changed, as it sticks out so much that anything else just goes unnoticed for me.

      Someone above commented on not liking the grey background (I think it has been like this before) I want to emphasize that I generally do not like sites with white background, as on most common backlit screens they tend to strain the eyes much more than a moderate grey like this. Indeed, I usually prefer a bright text color in front of a dark background, but I think your grey background pretty much nailed the middle ground where it’s still classic “black text on white canvas” but on the other hand not a strain on the eyes even after long reading.

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        Maybe is he removed the shadow below the font? There is not enough of contrast because of the shadow I think.

  30. Factoid says:

    Looks pretty good for me on the latest version of Chrome (16.0.912.75).

    The only thing I never liked style-wise about the layout of this blog i the title image. It seems weird to me that you have that row of icons above your title.

    I understand wanting a little bit of visual separation from the top of the page before hitting the title graphic, but it seems to me like it would look better to have those underneath.

    Have you ever done a heatmap of the site to see where people actually click? I always forget those icons even do anything, so I never ever click on them. I wonder if anyone else does.

  31. Jeff says:

    Two suggestions and a bug:

    1 – I know you’re used to having them, but I don’t think your icon buttons at the top really contribute much to navigation at this point, and they don’t really fit the new look. Unless you have metrics that indicate that people are actually using them fairly heavily, I think you would do better to lose them, and reclaim some of the vertical space they occupy to shorten the header – which annoyingly enough runs halfway down my screen at 1280×800. After the internal headers/headlines, that means I get to read FOUR lines of text without scrolling, which is super-annoying.

    2 – I feel like your top menu is awfully crowded. If I were you, I would seriously consider kicking down the font size a point or two.

    The Bug – In both Safari 5.1.2 and Chrome 16.0.912.75, I have so much horizontal scroll that I can move the site content almost entirely off the left size of a maximized browser window (as in, I can see about 20% of your right sidebar ad). In my experience as a web developer, this is often the result of a DIV that has a position but not a width, and for some reason gets treated by WebKit as having a width of 100%, which, unless it’s right on the left edge of the site, creates massive scroll. If that’s the case, setting the width should fix the bug. Also note that this bug appears only when viewing a single post – viewing the front page of the site is fine.

    1. Shamus says:

      Chrome is my primary browser, and of course I don’t see this bug. Hmmm.

      Did I mention I hate web development? Forever?

      There can’t be more than three or four million divs in my CSS. I’ll see what I can find.

      1. Jeff says:

        I found your problem! It’s this comment.

        For some reason, your site isn’t forcing line-breaks in that long link, so it’s pushing out of the side of the comment thread and running willy-nilly off to the right, hence the scroll.

        1. Shamus says:

          Thanks! That would have taken me ages to figure out.

          Fixed.

  32. Joel D says:

    Something about the font in all the blue bars (Search, Archives, Categories, etc.) bothers me. It seems too big (I can see a pixel “staircase” instead of a diagonal line) and too crammed (the v in Archives is practically touching the i and e).

    Everything seems to be working fine.

  33. Smejki says:

    Hi Shamus,
    The new article titles are way better than yesterday version but you please make them a bit smaller?
    Thanks

  34. Dev Null says:

    The date taking two lines and dropping below the division bar looks wierd.

    I wish there was an easy way for the comments to pop-out to the full width of the page once the right menu-bar is finished. So much screen real-estate going to waste! I’d guess that the vast majority of your posts are at least as long as that right bar anyways; you could do a horizontal divide below the main post _and_ that bar (dividing the top bit left-right for the post and the bar) and put the comments in a lower full-width section…

  35. Moriarty says:

    With the new ad space stretching the space above the twentysided banner your side gets really dark.

    The dark blue space is bigger, the light part above the blue “about the author” line is shorter and the blue behind the text is also darker. It doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the site, with the light grey background and the lighter blue comment boxes.

  36. Lord Nyax says:

    I really miss the catagory links that were above the site name. I just showed a friend yesterday how those little boxes could send you to all the catagories, and now they’re gone. He’ll think I was trolling him.

    Humor aside, I always loved just clicking on a rondom catagory and wandering through it. So if we could get those boxes back, it’d be really nice.

    1. Lord_Bryon says:

      seconded, it was nice to be able to browse the archives by category, other than that the site looks good.

  37. LegendaryTeeth says:

    Bit late to this party, but to see how websites look in mobile browsers, try the Ripple emulator: http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/

  38. Alex says:

    Am I crazy, or is the text on things like the header a lot less anti-aliasey than I remember? Or is it just more noticeable in a sans-serif font?

  39. Simulated Knave says:

    I think the gap between the posts and the sidebar containing all the links etc. needs to be slightly wider. Back when things were soft and mellow, the small gap was fine. Now that things are harder and cleaner looking, the small gap makes the whole page look somehow…off.

  40. Irridium says:

    Alright, so, I don’t mind the overhead ad, but does it have to get rid of all the icons at the top? I’d love to see those stay. Made searching for things easier.

  41. Drew says:

    Probably kind of a nitpick, but I HATE the lowercase k in the title font, with the loop in the k. (you can see it here: Link) I think it kind of reads as a screwed up capital R. But I might be unique in my distaste for it.

  42. Milos says:

    The only thing I don’t like are the new titles. I don’t know whether it’s the new tall font or the way it’s positioned separated above the tags, but it seems to take too much vertical space on the page. Nothing that causes me great irritation but this post is for nitpicking so just throwing that out there.

  43. Fat Tony says:

    A) Love the fonts!
    B) “Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don’t post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun.” – Very cute, also very good.
    C) Getting a small issue: Image, with the… bar thing at the top. The catagory thumbnails aren’t loading and some of the links aren’t appearing on the actual bar, which whilst diminishing from the look, doesn’t really effect me that much, as I was more prone to the search function then the thumbnails, still just flagging an issue, just in case, you know.
    D)Keep up the good work! (And the hating web development, forever)

    (Also maybe add smilies! =D)

  44. SoldierHawk says:

    Oh, can I also say that although I loathe animated ads, I don’t mind those project wonderful ones at the top of the site? Mostly because they’re at the TOP of the site, and once I scroll past them, they aren’t distracting me from content. I feel no need to block those. Well done Shamus–I hope this turns out well for you.

  45. BeardedDork says:

    This flashy animated ad makes me want to turn my adblock back on.

    http://i415.photobucket.com/albums/pp234/mrpoostinks/20sidedad.jpg

    1. Fat Tony says:

      (Sassy black woman from brooklyn mode activated)
      Wow, you’s a fussy b****.
      (Sassy black woman from brooklyn mode de-activated)
      it’s not that bad.

  46. ToastyVirus says:

    I’m glad you decided to take up on the suggestion for more ads, I’ll be sure to click on them whenever I come here!

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      I think you mean “I’ll be sure to click on them whenever I’m planning on buying what they have to sell.
      Clicking on adds with no intention of making a purchase just poisons the adverts and makes people who give Shamus money hate Shamus. You don’t want people to hate Shamus, do you?

  47. Elethiomel says:

    Hi,

    Your site now needs me to allow scripts on “shamusyoung.com”, “googlesyndication.com” and “projectwonderful.com” to display ads. Why is this? Your site ran brilliantly without shamusyoung.com scripts before. If I disable scripts on projectwonderful, the top ad disappears without leaving the banner about disabling adblock. If I disable scripts on googlesyndication, the side banner disappears. If I disable scripts on shamusyoung, both disappear and (if I have projectwonderful enabled) the banner about adblock appears. Why do three sites need to run their code on my processor in order to serve me ads on one? They’re even just gifs!

    Please understand this is not about not trusting your site, but while I want you to make money off my browsing I also want to keep the number of scripts I have to allow to a minimum.

    1. Shamus says:

      This is a trial period for Project Wonderful. If the ads perform well, I keep them. If not, then I’m back to Google ads. So having both at once is a temporary thing so that I can compare how they perform.

  48. Elec0 says:

    I noticed that on the main page the title is “Twenty Sided – “, for the tags, which looks odd.

  49. Nick Bell says:

    One complaint: the ad at the top of the page. I HATE horizontal ads above the content. It just makes me scroll more to get to your writing.

    In that same vain, I’d dump the quick-link icons. They are neat in concept, but I don’t see them being used much. If your metrics say otherwise, they’re fine to say.

    I would also change the info bar at the top of posts (CATEGORY, AUTHOR, DATE, etc) and put all that at the bottom. Maybe put a small author line (like you currently have with “Previous”). I feel it is waste space between the top of the page and the text. It’s nice, and important info, but will all be perfectly well served at the bottom of the post.

    Simply put, the post content is king, and you shouldn’t put things in the way of getting to that text.

    1. Fat Tony says:

      But it’s not like 2/3″ of screen space is “in the way”, i can start reading the yop article of the site, without having to scroll, sooo, seems like your starting to nitpick. IMO.

      1. Nick Bell says:

        Oh I agree: this is totally nit-picking. Shamus has a wonderful website that works really well, so it’s hard to find huge flaws. Little stuff like this is all there really is.

    2. Volatar says:

      I for one happen to use those link icons semi-regularly.

      1. Nick Bell says:

        What for, if you don’t mind me asking?

  50. Kyle says:

    Working in chrome 4 and the formatting for the DMoTR index seems off. Looks like the font size for the ‘Category’ column is too big.
    Otherwise, nice update, will take some getting used to but it looks sleeker.

  51. Susie Day says:

    maybe add a little more space between your main column and the right hand side? they feel crowded and trigger claustrophobia :-(

  52. According to the Internet WayBack Machine your site looked like this in february ’06 and like this in may ’06.

    1. Gnarf, botched the link posting.

      Feb ’06

      May’06

      A preview function for post’d be nice, Shamus.

  53. Jokerman says:

    Looks weird at first but ill get used to it.

  54. LachlanL says:

    Hi. This isn’t exactly related to the OT, but something that has been an outstanding issue for a while for me. I read your articles through the RSS feed. For the most-part things are fine, except for urls to resources (usually images) on your site. Those don’t seem to work as a rule. For whatever reason, the URLs on the RSS feed are different to those on the actual web article.

    As an example, here is the second url from this article in the RRS feed:
    http://www.shamusyoung.com/images/back_button.jpg (gets a 404)
    and here it is on the page itself:
    http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/back_button.jpg (works just fine)

    So yeah, somehow the /twentysidedtale/ part is being removed. I wouldn’t expect this to make much difference, but I am using Google Reader.

  55. Zak McKracken says:

    I wanted to post that Opera, since it has been also available for mobile devices for some time now, features a “mobile mode” where the page is reformatted for phones, but … I don’t find it now! Did they remove it for version 11? Or did they put it in between all the developer tools?
    I did find the error console, though, and the option to send any page to an error checker on the web. It does find a few unclosed brackets and stuff, although I’ve only ever coded good old HTML, and this is far beyond my understanding.

    Anyway: This page looks good on Opera (on Linux, even), and there must be a “mobile device simulation” mode somewhere in Opera or at least Dragonfly (which is a web IDE that comes with Opera), but I’m not the guy who’ll find it, sorry.

    1. Zak McKracken says:

      Also: I like the new layout, even though it was just a subtle change. Good-looking topic title font.
      Regarding the ads: You mentioned changing from google ads to project wonderful. I just saw that opera was blocking project wonderful for your site, so I deactivated it, but I still see no ad. Not that I’m sad about _not_ seeing them, but… anyway I prefer PW to googleads anytime. Hope it works out.

      1. Zak McKracken says:

        PW ads are being displayed now. All’s fine

  56. Volatar says:

    So, I turned off adblock to see the new ads. I was then presented with this lovely ad: http://i.imgur.com/gMKdC.jpg along with a couple similar ones.

    Sorry, but I had to turn adblock back on, at least for the moment. Hoping you can move over to Project Wonderful fully soon.

    1. Volatar says:

      And my lovely I mean “OH GOD GET IT OFF MY SCREEN!”

  57. I’m finding the new sans-serif font used for the post titles a little too condensed (tall and thin) to be readable. Otherwise stuff looks nice and clean and easy to read.

  58. rayen says:

    … Gah! Changes… Anyway now that shock is out of the way;
    – …
    – ……
    – ………it’s…
    – It’s not bad… It’s like the Escapist, It’s not bad, it’s just different…
    – I’m not crazy about the top banner ad, but i’m pretty sure that isn’t up to you.
    – The Title font… will take some getting used to. I dunno that the tall skinny font in the Author, Time, Date thing is good i liked it the same as the text font. It’s not unreadable it’s just too different from everything else that it’s kinda distracting. Like a splash of mustard on a mayo, ham and cheese sandwich. (great now i want a sandwich)

  59. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Shamus,I think you broke something.Look at the time stamps in this picture.The one that was posted earlier shouldnt be at the end.

    1. Shamus says:

      I figured out what went wrong. Someone left a comment saying “delete this please”. I did. Problem was, gamer had already replied. Without the OP, the reply has no place to go, and ends up someplace unexpected.

  60. Atarlost says:

    I don’t use any of the browsers you tested in so I don’t know it looks the same, but it looks fine in Opera.

  61. Zaghadka says:

    Looks great. I like the post title font. Looks like you’re still optimized for 1024×768, which makes the body text column a little narrow on a 1920×1080/1200 display, but I assume that’s a WordPress thing. Nothing a little browser zooming can’t fix anyway.

  62. BvG says:

    I think the new font is hard to read, especially with the addition of bold links.

  63. Stephen says:

    This may have already been covered, but in the TITLE tag in your website’s header on the main page, it reads “Twenty Sided – “. It looks like it’s putting a blank field on the other side of that hyphen (maybe your blog description field or something similar?).

    You may want to take a peek at your theme’s header.php file and see what’s going on. It’s a tiny thing, but now I’ve said it you’ll never unsee it :).

  64. Solf says:

    Hi, long time reader, never posted :)

    But since you’re asking for input… I’m using Opera 11.60 (I know, I know, Eastern European and all that — still a very nice browser :P) and I hate (with a passion) smoothed/anti-aliased fonts — so I have it as completely disabled as possible (under Windows 7).

    And, well, those new fonts you use for categories and article title — they don’t look nice when not smoothed.

    Hm, actually it doesn’t have anything to do with Opera — same effect with FF (and IE, but mine is hacked, if I recall correctly, to disable smooth fonts), so I guess the fonts are just poorly done for non-smoothed presentation.

  65. SyrusRayne says:

    There’s no longer a link to Free Radical, Shamus. Where did that go?! Right when I decide I want to re-read it. :(

  66. rayen says:

    okay you set it so that there is a ad banner along the top, for some reason IE on my laptop and firefox on my desktop have trouble displayi it. i get a box on top covering half of the topic icons with the cannot display webpage stuff in it.

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You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

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Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

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