T w e n t y S i d e d
Thirteen hours. I had so much to do yesterday, and instead I burned through thirteen hours building a completely new theme for the site. This included biting the bullet and making one controlled by CSS, instead of a table-based layout like I’ve always used.
Now, it’s pretty common for people flip out and hate every new theme that goes up. The overall reaction to most site changes are negative. So either my blog has been getting worse since its inception, or this is the type of thing that people either protest or accept without comment.
The theme needs of this site are incredibly complex by this point. With five years of posts under our belt, there is a lot of content and a lot of features that people have grown to love. Those old posts see traffic every single day, and they need to look right. We have posts with nearly seven hundred comments. We have the dice roller, which is part of the personality of the site while at the same complicating lots of small changes. We have hundreds of image-heavy posts that were authored with the expectation that the main content column would be 600 pixels wide, and those old posts would go all wonky if I changed that. The archives are long, there are lots of categories, and there are many, many little tags I’ve used for formatting specialized content over the years.
Good things about this new theme:
1) Nested comments – It’s always bugged me the @comment number system of notation that people have needed to cobble together in order to make a discussion work. It falls apart if I need to remove comments later. More importantly, it’s hard to follow discussions that go back and forth with ten other unrelated comments between them. There’s a chance this feature could lead to “first post”-ing shenanigans or a general watering down of discussion threads. If that becomes a problem, I can always disable this. Frankly, I like that people will have long, esoteric side-discussions and I’d like to encourage that.
2) Paged comments – Not crazy about this one, but it needed to be done. Comments will be broken into pages, which will have an adverse effect on long discussions. I haven’t decided how many comments per page, but I’m leaning towards 50.
3) Post navigation is vertical, comment navigation is horizontal. – A while back we had a discussion on how to handle archives, and the fact that the standard left / right vs. prev / next are completely ambiguous. The archives are now all vertical, with older being “down”. This lets us use left and right for comment pages. Hopefully this will not be too confusing.
4) Archives are now a dropdown. Yearly archives are too big to be meaningful. Monthly archives take up too much dang space. Yay for drop down boxes.
5) Faster generation. The whole point of this overhaul is to stop my site from going down when several thousand people all show up for the comic.
6) New category icons at the top. I’ve always wanted this, but could never get them to look right until now. This is because I’m 99% engineer and 1% artist. Aesthetics are hard for engineers and people with bad taste. And I am both.
Feedback solicited, although I request that people go easy on the rage. I know there will be annoyances and problems. And I know the solution looks simple to you. But it isn’t.
I don’t expect the theme to pass muster this first time out. I think I’ll leave it up for twelve hours to gather feedback and then take it down again at 6pm EST today.
I have tested in both Firefox and IE 7. If it looks terrible in IE 6, I do not care. As long as it’s readable, for IE6 users, I’m happy.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
I think it’ll take a bit of getting used to… but I like it! Using Chrome, and it seems to be operating well, and looking fine.
You should make the D20 on the main page a “Random post” button, though. :o
Super kudos, nice job for a day’s work!
Actually, if I had to choose ONE thing, it’d be the tooltip delay on the links at the top. But that might be my own problem, I have no idea.
Oh, also, maybe make the archives expandable within their search parameters? Ie, if you click on the anime link, and click, say, Porco Rosso, could you make it expand without reloading the page? Or would that be too much of a time/system sink?
And here is an example of replying to somebody.
Hi BaCoN.
*Seeing what replies to replies look like*
…and this is an example of a reply to a reply.
I wasn’t expecting a theme upgrade so soon; I thought i had wandered into the wrong site.
I have to say though, I’m pleasantly surprised.
How small will these boxes get? I mean, will the person replying to this reply’s reply’s reply have one word per line? This might cause problems even if we go too far down the discussion… Unless it’s turtles all the way down that is.
Edit: Dig the new theme, looks fine in chrome. I hope you realize though that even one person replying to a post in an older thread can completely ruin the little legibility that thread had (with all the @postnumbers) since everyone who is below this post just went up 1 number on their dice. I guess that makes me a +1 to postcount modifier… huh, wonder what my dm would let me do with that.
The reply depth maxes out at 5, which I can adjust. (Notice you can’t reply to this one.)
I’d like to adjust the indent depth, but danged if I can find how to do that in CSS.
I’m probably old enough that I should be able to resist the instinctive desire to test out things like replies to the nth degree.
@Shamus: In your CSS unordered lists with the class “children” seem to have a padding to the left of 40px. I cannot find out where exactly this has its origin as my firebug does not seem to work properly. :( You could work around this problem by also giving them a negative margin to the left. That would not be a very elegant way, but it’ll do the trick.
In your style.css look for “div.comments ul.children”
around line 326 and add the property padding-left: 15px; (or whatever you want your indent to be)
Smaller and smaller comment boxes seem a good way to mitigate Flame Wars and long back and forths discussing some minor point. If all you can expect is a tiny microscopic area in which your lovingly crfated arguments/Nazi analogies will slip past the eye of the average observer then why make them!
On the subject aat hand though,. I am interested in how small the boxes will get. Maybe 1 letter?
Re-installing firebug helped. C. David Dent already pointed out where to edit the padding properly.
Shamus – according to Firebug, the indent of child comments is based on the padding of unordered lists. If you add something like “padding-left: 30px” to the “div.comments ul.children” container (line 326 of style.css according to Firebug), it should tweak the child comment indents.
Currently, it’s 40px.
EDIT: Curses! My clever plan to help debug a CSS formatting issue was foiled by C getting there first! Curse you, C! CURSE YOU!
Ooh, nested. Fancy! Now I have to see what a reply to a reply looks like.
As an engineer with no taste, I like the appearance of the page and the navigation on the right. The category icons up the top don’t bother me one way or the other. (I’m more of a text person!) I agree about the font size being a bit small with the serifs. (But I’m so used to zooming web pages that I had to reset the zoom to see what everyone else was talking about.)
I don’t remember ever seeing the dice before this post. I was wondering about that bit when I read yesterday’s post. I’m actually finding the dice to be a bit hard to read, but I like the idea now that I’ve seen it!
I would vote for displaying page 1 comments by default, especially since you list them in chronological order on the page.
I’m only reading this after having finished the page 2 comments, so… yeah, agreed. You wouldn’t want people to start reading your posts in the middle, why do you want us reading the comments from the middle?
I AM NOT A GUINEA PIG FOR YOUR REPLIES! >:O
Hey, erm, Shamus, would it possible to be able to leave a thing to delete your own comments, or…?
I love the new setup and I think it looks way more slick. My one and only complaint is the text appears to be smaller now.
Accidental IE6 user here. Looks quite readable, no worries.
New design looks spiffy even here. Can’t wait to see what it’s like a proper browser.
Why, oh why IE6? Do you still own a typewriter and was your clothes in the river on a washboard?
Let me introduce you to my friend Firefox.
Some people are using IE6 because they don’t have install permissions at work or some other restriction.
That’s just how it is.
I’m hoping it’s some other restriction, or you need an IT division with either the intelligence or the permission to keep software up to date, to at least the point where it’s still secure.
The Java based software we use at my work doesn’t run on Firefox (what?). Luckily, we can at least use IE7 or 8 here.
As an intelligent IT man, I can speak from experience that supporting web applications sucks. We STILL have applications without proper support for anything but IE6. Major ones which run our entire operation, even.
The vendor claims IE7 and IE8 compatibility, but they use some third party java tools that don’t work for some users.
Hence IE6 is our standard browser still. We’ll update to IE7 or 8 if the system does not need that application, though.
that’s why we have Portable Apps (http://portableapps.com/)
…which include firefox, btw ;-)
Actually I can’t use that either, no portible media allowed.
What he said. Note the usage of the term “accidental”. I have no clue who manages IT here (administration of a medium-sized German town). Either way, now I’m looking at this site using my trusted Firefox 3.5.7 and I approve. Stuff isn’t Times New Roman anymore, which is a bonus.
You should be able to install Portable Firefox with normal user permissions. IT would not be pleased with you if they found out, but that’s another issue.
Edit: And someone already suggested the portable version. Allowed? Allowed by the system, or by company policy? Again, it’s probably not the best of ideas.
It’s certainly a big change, and I think all big changes will look weird at first — probably most of the reflexive negative reaction to changes comes from the fact that people have become used to a particular appearance, so any change will clash with what we’re expecting. I’m sure in a week I’ll be expecting the current look, and it’ll be fine.
One note: on my screen, the icons representing the different categories (Rants, Video Games, etc) across the top are a bit too faded when they’re not being moused over. It took a while to realize that they weren’t just part of the background, and if they were a bit brighter I think that would be easier to understand. Maybe some mouse-over text to indicate the category name, too? (Oops, that mouse-over text is there already, never mind.)
Since I didn’t really liked the former design (but I really don’t care too much about such things), this a great improvement.
It looks very very nice and slick.
I hope the nested comments will give your site more of a “community” feeling, without sliding into the “battle arena” zone (in a bad way).
Congrats!
The last comments page is displayed by default…this seems counter-intuitive to me, because I usually want to read older comments first and newer ones sometimes respond to previous ones, making thing a bit confusing…
Anyone else agree with me?
Yeah I agree with this. It is easier to see if someone has made the same point I want to make if I can see the discussion in order….
Yep, me too. Was going to leavea comment about this, but noticed this one and was able to enjoy the replying to comment goodness! Mmmmmm.
I want to add my agreement to this too. I would greatly prefer to start at the beginning of the comments as opposed to somewhere in the middle.
Overall, after my initial shock, I am really enjoying the redesign. Great job.
Agreed.
Seconded (or thirded or whatever it is by now). That would be my only negative as well. Otherwise – nice work.
I agree with Narida, starting with the last comments page seems wrong. And it encourages people to post without reading the comments.
All in all things are looking good though!
I like the new theme; it’s sleeker & more modern. Also, if it’s more functional than the previous setup than there’s little reason to go back. Things change, things grow, things evolve. It’s not worth it to cling to something so petty as a websites’s interface, especially when the alternative looks so similar.
The font is tiny on my (Firefox) browser. Like 8 pt. Hope this is unintentional. It’s a pet peeve of mine that site designers want to control page size, font size, and link color. I have fonts set large on my machine (since I’m an old fart) and it’s amazing how many sites are completely wrecked by that.
Also, (though I don’t know if you do this), why would any site set visited and unvisited links the same color?? You all have perfect memories or something? I have the options set to not allow sites to set their own colors. This breaks lots of menus and pushbuttons under Firefox, which is a nuisnace.
And hey, your text box doesn’t scroll….
Using FireFox here and it’s no where near 8 point font for me.
Maybe you unintentionally have it zoomed?
Try View -> Zoom -> Reset
I am using version 3.5.7 or as I like to call it Magnum! And as I said no worries for me.
Text is back to default size for me, so perhaps he changed something since this morning. Thx, if so.
The comment textarea now has vertical scroll bars too. Usable!
Since you are looking for feedback:
– text needs indentaion, especially in the comments
– make use of whitespace between comments and between the categories
– drop the very dark blue for the horizontal bars in favour for a lighter one, color-pick it from your picture with the many dices from the bottom
– at the very top and bottom of the document don’t fade out to black, fade out to a darker grey with a very light touch of color instead
– for the d20 at the top don’t use a black or grey shadow, put a bit of color into it, see pic with dices at the bottom for reference
– the comment box needs a scrollbar for large comments
– the asterisks below the comments shouldn’t have a white background
– the backgrounds for the comments should pick up a colorscheme used somewhere else on the page, preferably in two different shades
– move the dices for the postcounts out of the box so they can stand on their own
– the horizontal blue bar at the top and the gradient above it create the optical illusion of the gradient being lighter than the grey below the bar, counter this with a slightly darker gradient
– at the size of your main text a font without serifs might be easier to read
I know this is quite a bit of feedback, but please don’t let it discourage you. For just a day of work you did a really good job on the reboot.
I was about to write a similar post, but I see neolith has done most of the work for me. I have two things to add though:
– Please make the comment author names Bold.
– The line “Comments are moderated and may not be posted immediately Required fields are marked *” needs a . after the immediately.
Apart from that, I dig the new design. 11 pts Times New Roman is what I usually write my stuff in. I did like the older blue tones better though, but I figure that’s something to play around with once you’ve got everything else sorted out.
Looks ok to me, firefox on a wide screen. This makes the main column a bit small for me, but as you said you need older posts to have 600px width, I won’t quibble.
The comment boxes – not sure I like the bluey coloured ones. But that’s an aesthetic thing, and I shame your engineer/bad tasteness
Bug report: the “Let’s Play” alt tag on the category at the top just shows “Let”. Quote issue I assume. :)
Comment boxes need some padding, and a softer border. I preferred the plain white background (I guess I was using the Lawful Good theme previously?) and I think this grey is a little too dark to be really clear.
If you want any assistance, I’m a web designer by trade and would be more than happy to spend some time prodding and poking and looking for Issues.
Fie!1! A Pox on your newfangled themes!!1!
Actually I kinda like what you’ve done with the place.
I like this design: it’s simple; page header and footer look pretty; background not too bright, yet the contrast is good.
However, I can see the ‘links’ and ‘rss feeds’ twice in the panel on the right side, is that an intention or a browser compatibility hack?
And as I’ve seen already mentioned in a post above, the white background under coloured asterisks is disturbing while reading.
Nice, very nice. I like it.
CC:
1. [Personal taste] The grey background doesn’t do the site justice. Its that same Windows 95 theme grey that I’ve begun to loath over the years. Maybe try playing with some slightly lighter greys?
2. Fonts. I hear playing with fonts can be a tricky business, but if you’re going to go modern then please use more eye friendly and smoother fonts such as Calibri.
3. Ahhh! I did have something else but right now I’m typing and can’t see. So please excuse me if I make spelling mistakes here. But it looks like Firefox doesn”t appears to paly well with this comment windows. No scroll bars, no nothing. Oh well. One step at a time eh? 100 points to me if my typing is perfect here…
[100 points to me if my typing is perfect here…]
[doesn”Âťt]
Better luck next time :)
Just in case you wonder, it works great on Opera. I still miss the dark theme anyway.
In general I like it. I’ve got 3 specific comments:
* Some padding between the comments text and the borders.
* Scrollbars don’t appear if you are editing a long comment (text “disappears on the bottom of the edit box) on Firefox 3.6.2pre @ Ubuntu. I had to finish this one on a notepad.
* I also think that the color scheme is ameliorable.
I’ve tried fetching colorsuckr.com with some of your images in order to get some color scales. But the thing gets a bit crazy with transparencies on PNGs – which you are very keen of, it seems.
I’ve tried the d20, the twentysided logo and the (colourful) dices near the bottom.
Example:
http://colorsuckr.com/?img=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shamusyoung.com%2Ftwentysidedtale%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2FRoller%2Fimages%2Flogo.png
If you put some non-transparent images there, the site will extract the main colors, and also give you nice shades for using on a websire (via friendsofcolor.com)
Overall i really like it. One thing though, i think the comments need a bit padding between the text and the box. It’s so close to the side that it looks wrong
I’m FREAKING OUT!
Serif fonts are hopeless. It’s currently too small to be easily readable.
I can read it, but I can read it as _quickly_ as I’d like to.
Different posts on the main page could use more of a break between them, the little line seems a bit inadequate.
I like the gray, but the blue/yellow seems a bit off. On the other hand, I can’t think of a *better* color choice, so I dunno.
I agree with an earlier poster that the comment dice need to be outside of the comment box, and an earlier-yet poster that the icons at the very top are too faded. I had to go back up and see what he was talking about.
Aside from minor quibbles like that though(and general unfamiliarity), the new theme looks nice. But, like the guy above me my text box isn’t scrolling properly for new lines. Pushing ‘page down’ is a work-around, though, for other people with this problem.
Last year, there used to be three options, Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic I believe. The Chaotic theme was always my favorite, with the light text on the dark screen. It disappeared a while back, after first being broken for a few weeks (It would only work on the first page, then revert back to the default when clicking through a link).
Any chance of bringing those themes back in some way? Or at least a light text on background?
No love for the Chaotic Evil theme?
About fonts: Times New Roman is a good font for newspapers. Are you a newspapers?
Usually, serif font are better on paper – because they materialize lines and make it easier for the eye to follow – but worse on screen – the serifs are often smaller than pixels and degrade the characters readability. Which is why I would suggest using a sans-serif font.
If you wish to use an “uncommon” font, you should consider the @font-face CSS attribute.
Comments with gray background are much harder to read than the purple ones.
For me at least… At this time of day (it’s 14:30 now).
I can’t say that I like this new theme, it really kills the personality of the site. =/
However, I understand that it’s a necessary change due to the traffic. So really, there’s nothing you can do about it no matter how anyone feels about any of the changes.
Still, I’ll really miss the old archives, I used to troll them all the time for something to read when bored, now they’re kind of user-unfriendly. Also, the comment box is acting really wonky for me. It won’t expand or anything.
I have NO IDEA why it refuses to show a scroll bar on the comment window. I’m simply stumped. If you asked me to make a textarea that didn’t allow scrolling, I’d have no idea how to do it. HTML offers no such functionality. The CSS doesn’t mention scrollbars in any way. This input box doesn’t differ from the old one in any meaningful way.
What the heck?
You may want to look into the CSS overflow property? Keep in mind though, I’m really just throwing this out there, not debugging your website with the Firebug plugin for Firefox.
http://www.w3schools.com/Css/pr_pos_overflow.asp
Yeah it’s here, style.css:
textarea#comment {
height: 13em;
xmargin: 0 0 0.5em;
overflow: hidden;
width: 98%;
xpadding: 5px;
}
Change it to:
overflow: auto;
Well that’s a fast workaround! o_o
In CSS the property is Overflow. The possible values for overflow are: auto, visible, hidden. With hidden, you get no scroll-bars, with visible your internal content just flows right out of the bounds of the box and with auto you get scroll bars.
Thanks!
Re: comment box, is there an “overflow” css property set for it somewhere?
(ended up finding it and replying in the comment thread above…see above)
Overall I like the new theme, although I much preferred the old chaotic theme. I spend my working life looking at a black background so my eyes have adjusted.
The grey is a nice compromise though.
I had never noticed that the dice changed with the exact number of posts I had assumed it they were just stock pictures that changed at significant figures like 6, 20, 40 ect. But now I see what’s going on very nice touch!
It’s a nice improvement Shamus, altough I hate the font (times new roman?). Verdana is much nicer as a web font.
If i may be so bold as to suggest something, i’d like to offer the following idea.
Why not force a 600px-wide-friendly-design on older posts to corral them in a readable format? Newer posts could benefit from any new wild design you’d throw at them, older post would still render with Ye Olde CSS and you wouldn’t have to balance the two. Albeit, the website visual identity would be broken in half but if you don’t mind you could have the best of two worlds.
Really like it, but I’d make a few changes if it were my call:
> A bit of margin between the comment text and comment box (like a lot of people already said)
> A brighter shade of grey for the background.
> The font, I’d pick Tahoma, Arial, or -if you’re feeling adventurous- Trebuchet for big headers and Verdana/Helvetica for the body.
Shamus, I’m a little confused by your space-time continuum , how are we posting an hour into the future? It’s 7:55 EST, where we are both located, but this post reads 8:55
Ah. DST adjustment. Fixed.
After giving the nested comments some more thought I’ve come to the conclusion that I _really_ don’t like them. Once the discussion starts to split up into several directions it is impossible to keep track of newer posts (unless you can make them stick out via a different color that is – but that might not be that easy).
edit: The new font is much better, only a little large for my taste. Try lowering it to 0.9em for better readability on smaller screens (for netbooks and the like).
Very much agreed…
When I first read the post, there were about 60 comments. Now there are 189 comments. Which means 129 comments that I havent read are strewn somewhere through the list of comments, and may be somewhere near the end or nowhere near the end at all…
Unless there can be some sort of “Posts since last visit” functionality, it becomes almost impossible to follow.
I was going to post about how much I like the new theme, and then I hit the purple in the comments – not so keen on that, or the way the comment text is mashed up against the left border of the box.
Other than that it’s really nice.
Overall, I love the new design. You kept the little bunch of dice at the bottom, which is my favorite part (I’m a cheap date).
I love the color scheme too – Plenty of contrast for reading, but not super-bright (which would hurt my eyes). It’s close enough to the Neutral scheme to make me happy.
I thought I’d like the nested comments, but it turns out I’m not crazy about them, for the same reason as Neolith. If I’m following the entire conversation and not just selected threads, nesting makes it harder to find new comments.
As for notation of previous comments, I miss the numbering, but understand why they you axed ’em. I find it just as easy to refer to comments by the person who posted them. I can always do a Find/Search on the page if I’m looking for something specific.
And I’m happy with any font that doesn’t make my eyes bleed. Including this one.
The stars after “Comments are moderated and may not be posted immediately. Required fields are marked”, “Name” and “Email” appear on white background, while everything else seems fine. I’m using Opera 10.10
The new theme looks good, but I still miss that chaotic theme..
At normal text size the site looks great, but it breaks when you zoom in (Firefox 3.5.x) – the comments and site text move left leaving no margin.
I confirm this. Everything is too far to the left if you zoom in Firefox 3.5.x. ( IE8 seems to skip THAT level of zoom, going from normal view directly to stage where you have horizontall scrollbar)
Not hugely fond of the gray background… I like black text on white the best, but I could fix it with Stylish if I really had to.
As for the rest, I’m probably disqualified from commenting since I never noticed the dice icons were a counter until you just pointed it out.
Hi Shamus,
The new theme looks great (Firefox 3.5.7 and Chrome 4.0.302.2 dev on Linux), I see you’ve been tweaking it even as I’ve been reading (eg fixed the “Let’s Play” title on the category image. To be honest I mostly ignore your categories and read everything as it comes out. All your posts are very… readable.
Some feedback if you’re interested… (mostly just extra votes for stuff already mentioned)
– Some less indenting on the comments
– Some padding around the comment text (probably most easily achieved by putting the comment text into a new div)
– Maybe make the text a notch bigger, though maybe I’m just tired :)
Also, I’m glad the dice stayed :D
I like it a lot. As a previous poster already mentioned, there should be padding between the borders and the text. Besides that, it’s faster, easier on the eyes, and the reply on comment function is just lovely. :)
So apparently you haven’t implemented the paged comments yet, since we’re far beyond your proposed limit of 50.
I like it.
The comments do get narrower as the nesting continues, so eventually you could end up with a vertical line of letters. :O
Is there any way to make the comments section be the full width of the screen and not be limited by that sidebar that doesn’t exend past the article, mosttimes?
edit: I see this has already been mentioned. :)
ps. The font looks great, the size is good on my screen anyway, so far so good!
He’s changed the font and size since I posted… The new size is perfect. Serif fonts are supposed to make reading long texts easier, but I honestly don’t notice a difference in readability with Verdana. Maybe it was designed with readability in mind.
It’s all looking great. I know how long these things can take, including the polishing and fine-tuning at the end. Well done.
Anyway I’m gonna go to bed now that it’s 3am. Though I know I’ll just lay awake thinking of various ways to optimise code I’ve written recently.
Testing on the live site when you’ve got a local mirror? Hehe, I do that all the time with my private sites but I wouldn’t dare with my client sites.
If I may make a suggestion, putting the padding in (.comment) rather than (div.comments ul.children li) will mean that the top levels have the text padded too :)
My brain keeps telling me there should be small (eg 5px) padding below nested replies so that they don’t just all end with one thick border… but it saves space.
I’m not sure what’s up, but I posted the above(142393) post after replying (142388) to Doc Kirzner’s post below (142377). Yet it appeared before (with a timestamp saying it was posted earlier).
I don’t know how post 142393 ended up before 142377 in the timeline with an earlier time. I thought that maybe (for some odd reason) nested posts were being moved to the bottom if replied to, but a quick look at some posts further up busts that theory.
Maybe the timezone got switched between Doc Kirzner posting their comment and me spamming with mine.
Also… Woo! The scrollbar’s back :D
I love the new theme Shamus!
Actually it’s a bit weird, but I’m trying to show you one of those extinct internet species known as a positive post. Rest assured that it’s really not that big a deal. My life will not be poorer and I will still visit your site obsessively and wonder why you don’t post something every 12 hours like I really wish you would.
I’m not a fan of the category bar at the top… it’s too dark and small, the icons make sense to you, but to me they are just a bunch of pictures and I have to hover each one of them to find out what they are (the delay for the alt or title text doesn’t help :-) )
I’d probably replace/complement them with some text if it was my site, but that is probably my personal taste :-). I usually just read everything you put out anyway, regardless of categories :-P
Looks good to me, except I’m not a big fan of the comment colors. More specifically the blue.
Oh also, AHHHH OH GOD!! *flips the fuck out*
Phew, glad I got that out of my system.
My problem with nested comments is I want to read the comments in the order they were posted. So if John posts at 3PM and Bob replies at 4PM i see John’s post, then Bob’s post, not Robert’s post at 6PM in which he replies to John’s post.
Though, its possible it might work better on a blog, but it was on a forum I was on a while ago and *shudder*
While I generally like the new look, I have a quick comment:
I didn’t even consider that I could interact with the icons at the top until you mentioned it (instead I thought, “Huh, cool new banner.”) Is there a way to better indicate those are interactive icons rather than just a banner?
They instantly looked clickable to me… though I immediately thought of the Mac OS Dock, or something similar
The icons at the top were not immediately obvious to me either, I thought they were just a banner image. If I might suggest something, perhaps a line of centered text (about #999999 in color) above the icons saying “Click an icon to navigate” would be helpful… then, when you hover over an icon, JS switches the text out for the category name.
Otherwise looks good to me, I’d like a tiny bit more padding on level 1 comments but that’s about it. Shiny.
I agree, they look too much like pure eye candy to be functional like they are. Maybe some javascript tooltips that appear when you hover over each icon for instant feedback? Also, moving them below the “About the Author | Best Posts” section would be more conventional and therefore obvious.
I hadn’t realized they were clickable either – perhaps if they weren’t so dimmed out?
Overall, think you’ve done a great job and kept the feel of your site intact.
Firefox 3.5.7 here, viewed from a Windows XP Pro and a Windows 7 machine. I really like the new deeper grey background, so easy on my eyes. I think the subject icons up top are very fun, although it will take time to assign the images to text “values” to make it simple to use. I am also a fan of the look of the nested comments. Overall I rate the new theme highly.
The changing of dice numbers after you post is the one thing I don’t like… if I know “I was post 23, so next time I come here I’ll start at 24…” That could be highly inaccurate now.
I expect it would cost too much in overhead, but just to toss it out, could “nested” comments be on a separate ID ladder from the main line dice numbers?
“Posted by in Projects by Shamus on February 1, 2010 ““ 7:00 am ”
Is it just me, or is there an extra “by” in there?
Unnecessary department of redundancies department.
I like it, good job
I really like the new theme… BUT the text is a little too close to the left side of the comment box for comfort. I don’t know why, it’s just that, aesthetically, the text not having enough room to breathe just bothers me.
Not a huge problem, but I doubt it would be too hard to fidget with.
I like it. I’m a pretty vanilla user. I never touch any of the navigation stuff really. I just click on the link in my RSS reader and then go away when I’m done.
I will echo what Lor Xyfets said…the comment text is aligning about 1 pixel away from the left border of the comment box. Needs a bigger pad, like 5 pixels maybe.
It’s not immediately obvious that the category icons at the top are actually buttons, though. If you hadn’t mentioned them I would have assumed it was just art. Not sure that it’s doing what you want it to functionality-wise…but it looks nice.
I’ll add my voice to the chorus on the text-near-the-border issue for comments… although strangely, it appears that the first reply to a comment has a reasonable distance from the margin.
Though the replys seems to have a good margin on the left, the right looks to be right on the border.
I wonder how many replies there can be to a message.
Site looks good!
I’m agreeing with the first being too far left, and the slow encroaching on space that’s occurring as replies stack is a bit annoying.
Overall, I like the new look and feel.
Edit – Just noticed replies maintain correct dice numbers. Sweet!
Edit 2 – Or maybe not?
I prefer it all the way to the left – wider is better, partiularly since the column is already kinda narrow, and shrinks further as the reply depth increases.
Another vote for “Looks good”. Different enough that I briefly wondered if I was elsewhere, distinctive enough that I quickly got used to it.
All in all, looks to be a change for the better.
I’M FREAKING OUT! Oh, you said NOT to. My mistake.
Anyways, I like the look of the new category thumbnails, but they’re not all immediately clear what they stand for… although I’m sure given a couple weeks’ exposure they’ll be second nature to me.
I am also fond of the new category thumbnails. Recognizable faces are an excellent choice for symbols.
If there is a lot of dissent to the thumbnail choices, I recommend a poll to decide which faces make the most sense for their category. Otherwise, good job Shamus, site is looking good.
Edit: On second look, the pictures for Game Design and Links are a little hard to figure out at first glance. Link looks like Master Chief to me, actually. Perhaps an older, cleaner version of him would work better?
Also, agree with the comments on dice size. Can’t really tell what number they’re supposed to be at my default screen size. 1280×800, btw.
Although the dice are cool, I vote for dropping them in favor of some other way of tracking postcount, perhaps a little roll-over counter thing like people used to have to show number of site views since whenever. Retro-90’s computerisms are cool.
Just so I’m not one of those “accept without comment” people… I likey.
It looks good.
I’ll second this. I’m afraid I don’t have enough time to read all the hundred-plus comments, since I’m over on the West coast and everyone else got here before me.
Me too,
I’d be lying if I said I dint still miss old features but I also gotta say I like it. I really enjoy getting to respond to ppl directly as I work through the posts.
Thanks for your hard work, Shamus. :)
Way too many comments for me to read, so I’m just posting this out there, see what you think.
1. There’s no note on allowed tags now, so I don’t know if they work anymore(I can see that some do, but it does raise questions on which tags do work).
2. The icons at the top of the page look like a background, not like clickable icons, I scrolled right past them without a second glance.
3. Proportions look slightly off with Midori, not an issue I would have brought up were you not looking for comments already.
4. The dropdown requires javascript. I understand that most people will have javascript enabled normally, but this is a geeky blog, I suspect you have a higher than average number of readers not using javascript.
5. The top level comments doesn’t have padding, or if it does the padding is far too small. This means that second…fifth level comments all have a small gap from the border, but top level don’t. Again, not an issue, but you’re asking for feedback.
6. The dice are too small now, they are very hard to make out, since you got rid of the text numbering it would be nice if you either made the dice easier to distinguish or got rid of them too.
7. That’s it.
8. No really, that’s it.
9. OK, so I noticed the text at the bottom and feel slightly uncomfortable with your blog having the word “bastardized” on every single page, I’m sure it’s funny, but your blog will get a bad rating for language if you don’t change it.
Pretty much agreed on Scragar’s points. And I want to see the nested reply option.
Love the paged comments idea. On pages with tons of comments, it would take forever to load all the comments, and I couldn’t ctrl-f for replies to my rants, or read the latest comments. Nested helps here, and if I want to see the last comment, I just click to the last page.
As long as the archives are searchable, I’m fine. I keep going back to certain ones (plot-driven door, etc), usually through your search. (Yeah, I should probably add it to my few thousand bookmarks, but …)
Uptime is good, especially when you don’t have to shell out for hardware and bandwidth. Folks who don’t understand the tradeoff may not like it, but if they ever run a popular site, they’ll get it.
Agreed with Scragar – The icons at the top are too dim and small to be really noticeable. Captions may be handy here, because I have to wait until the picture comment pops up to know what I’m pointing at. Would a “Mac Dock” effect be too difficult to code/plug in?
And to heck with IE6. If you’re reading this, you probably have the leet skeels to run another browser.
Long story short: It completely passes muster with me.
PS: You’re more than 1% artist. Your preferred medium seems to be words, but DMotR and Stolen Pixels shows that you’ve got visual skills, too.
I definitely agree with the “Icons look like a background” point. They’re very cool now that you pointed them out, but I think they need to be moved somewhere so that they’re more obvious on initially loading the page.
Your new theme probably takes some time to get used to it, but I can live with most of the changes. Except comment pagination. It destroys the feeling of the site for me having to click around to see the first or the last comment.
Additionally, it seems to be broken currently anyway. It says “84 comments”, has two pages. One page with one comment (number 51), and all the others on the second page.
My main complaint is that the top bar were the catgory pcitures are is a bit too dark, the picture is meant to graphically tell you what the catagory is, but its a bit too dark to see without straining. I appreciate that there is a popup if your mouse goes over a catagory, but if you were looking for something specific and did not know where it was, you’d go from one to the other, waiting for the popup.
Yeah, the top bar is way to dark in general, and doesn’t really look like a row of buttons.
I suggest that, instead of darkening all the images except the highlighted one, you should make them all bright, and put a colored border around the highlighted button.
Swapping the black gradient for a dark blue would also make the top bar less oppressive and unattractive.
I’m loving the gray background though! It’s great for after hours reading.
(Wow, it is so trippy to have the newest posts at the top. It’s more like a hard to navigate forum than a comment roll.)
I think it looks good, but I’m another one who thought the icons up top were just a pretty banner until I read the comments saying otherwise.
Oh, and I don’t know if it is just me, but the dice seem smaller and harder to read now.
It’s not just you, for either comment. And again, numbering system is broken by the combination of pagination and nested comments.
Okay, the comment numbering:
The built-in WordPress stuff only gives me the ability to limit how many TOP-LEVEL comments appear on a page.
This is stupid in many ways, but I suppose it fixes the problem of needing to cut a thread in half. Still, I don’t see ANYTHING in wordpress that will tell me what @#%ing comment is at the top of this page. I’ve been using:
page number * number of comments per page = first comment number.
But if page 1 is 50 top-level comments, each of which have 1 reply, then page 2 would need to start at 100.
Sigh.
I think you need to fix it so the first page is page ‘0’. As a guess, this is why the first comment is numbered 101.
reading this on my windows mobile phone has become frustrating…
scrolling down and up on the page using arrow keys doesn’t seem to work, i suspect it’s because it’s seeing the whole page as one object… all the paragraphs get outlines when it fails. I have to use the browser scroll bar, which scrolls too quickly and requires pulling out the stylus.
I realize that I’m in the minority, and you likely don’t have a windows mobile device to use in testing.
Just sayin’, is all. this was one of the sites I read that I could read on the bus to work, doesn’t seem that way anymore. I’ll still come by from regular computers…
on a regular computer using Firefox now… site looks ok, but I have to “me too” about the dice. Too small.. there’s a huge space off to the left of this little pane, you could accommodate big fat jpegs of dice over there.
AHHH! “Please do not freak out?” “PLEASE DO NOT FREAK OUT?!”
…
Ok. ;-)
On the whole, it looks good. I was going to mention the asterisks at the bottom, but I see others already have. I think it needs a little tweaking here and there (the gradients at the top and bottom start out too black–I think starting with a darkish gray would be better, and the navy blue bars at top and bottom, and over the navbar sections to the right should be a different shade–perhaps matching the darkest blue in the “Twenty” of the title, or a shade or two darker), but for one day’s effort, without a prior plan, this is some pretty darn good results.
Regarding the proverbial straightjacket you’ve made for yourself regarding formatting (has to have a main text column of a specific width in deference to old posts and so forth), is there any way of making sure that posts before a certain date maintain that formatting without requiring that everything going forward does? Not sure whether you’d want to do that, since it would result in abrupt changes in look for someone going through the archives, but just thought I’d mention it as an idea.
Ooh! Responsive changes. I come back a few hours later, and already stuff is different. I like the new gradient at the top (though I note the one at the bottom is still black. Intentional, or an oversight?), and the less-dark blue of the bars. I like the comment boxes better now, too–I see you picked the blue from the header. It’s getting there!
Its Pretty! YAY!
Fantastic work, old bean.
New articles? Ooh. Something to read. Wait. A new theme?
*runs in circles, screaming* AHHHHHH!!!!
EDIT: Okay, okay. Real content.
I came for the game reviews(love ’em!), but the posts about coding and such are one of the reasons to stay. I really enjoy your posts on design, debugging, etc. like these last two. As a programmer, it’s always interesting to read about the approaches of other people.
Good work on the optimizations! I’m going to quickly scan the comments on this post, but, if you haven’t noticed, avatars aren’t loading. (Not for me, at least.) Yikes. Running out of time on my edit. Quick thoughts: Dice could be bigger. I know that the comment boxes are limited by the format of the post, which is retro-fitted, but they look like they can get even smaller than the already “tight fit” which is a nuisance. Any change for better readability is appreciated, and will be patiently anticipated. Otherwise, I like the theme.
Looks good!
More padding in the comment box perhaps? ^^
I like it.
The only thing I’d say is that the icons at the top, above the “Twenty Sided” site logo, are not immediatley noticable as being selectable. At first glance, for myself anyways, they just seemed to be an aesthetic choice to go with the “Twenty Sided” logo. It wasn’t until I moused over one and it lit up that I realised I they were links. This may be just me however, as I am incredibly scatterbrained sometimes.
Aside form that one minor point, I like the new look, especially the logo :D
I love it! The large comment boxes freaked me out at first but after two seconds I saw that they make it really easy to see which comment is a reply to which (also because of the colours).
The only thing I don’t like is the whitish background on the *’s denoting required fields.
I didn’t read through all the rest of the comments, so I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned any of these things or not, but here goes. When I click on the comments link in the article from the main page, it takes me to the second page of comments, which is a bit disconcerting. When I want to read comments, I want to start at the beginning. I hate the paged comments, but I understand if there’s just no way around that. I also miss having a numeric post number. I know I can figure it out from totting up the dice, but I can’t just glance at them and know what the post number is. I also wish the site had more color. It seems like everything is blue: the category bars, the links, the post titles, but that’s a minor nitpick. I really like the nested comments, and I think the category icons are neat. My very first thought when I loaded the page this morning was, “Hey, cool!” So despite my whining, I really do like the new theme. :)
Regarding changes since this morning: I like the new comment boxes and the category bars. The category bars especially seem to have new life. I like the change from black to dark blue up at the very top, though I think the icons should still stand out more. But me likey!
Very nice. In general, I like it.
Others have already mentioned the icons at the top, but on my screen, they’re so dark, I can barely even see them. I didn’t even realize they were graphics, let alone clickable icons.
But it’s no big deal for me, since I’d never use them, anyway. The text links to different categories are conveniently located, easy to read, and what I’d normally use in any case. I’m a text sort of guy… :)
Edit: Oh, yeah, I can’t see the dice well enough to tell what number a comment is supposed to be. I’d much prefer actual numbers there, instead.
Somehow this seems more pleasant to the eye.More harmonious I think.
Okay. Finished reading all of the comments. Yep, it seems like it’s just me(no one else appears to mention it), but avatars aren’t displayed in comments. I have the red-x “no image” box, displayed out-of-synch with the top-left corner, above the “[name] says:” line. For reference, I’m using ie7 on XP SP 3. Unfortunately, I, too, am one of those that has no control over which browser is used, including portable versions.
I can see everyone’s avatar, so no problems here.
As for the new layout, not bad! I especially like the new category list at the top of the page…
Really liking it! The buttons at the top are very sleek. Nothing but improvements here
I love the new theme. Buttons at the top are great. Moving away from tables and to CSS is even better. Great job!
In general, it looks great. Just minor tweaks —
1) Text in comment boxes seems to be REALLY close to the left side of the box.
2) The icon buttons at the top are a fantastic add, but I think they need to stand out a little more. First read of the page, didnt realize they were ‘clickable’. I like that they ‘light up’ when you mouse over them – I think all that really needs to be done is have them ‘a little more lit up’ when you ARENT mousing over them.
Some comments:
– At first I didn’t like the black fade at the top, but then after looking at it some more I realized it looks like a stage, and that’s pretty nifty.
– Nothing seems broken at a glance, but comments have their text appear too close to the box outline. Because the names are in italics, some people’s names actually touch the line (easily noticeable with names that start with N), and that bugs me. Adding a tiny bit more space between the “wall” and the text would look very good. (Firefox 3.6, 1280×1024)
Overall, I like it. Some feedback on the icons at the top, and which ones work for me (by “works” I mean I get what it refers to):
Anime – works.
D&D Campaign – doesn’t.
DM of the Rings – works.
Game Design – kinda works. Its obvious its about games, but the design doesn’t really come through. I’ll probably recognise it now that I’ve read the text.
Game Reviews – works, but its a bit pale and faded – I have to kind of screw my eyes up to make out what I’m looking at.
Lets Play – works.
Links – doesn’t.
Movies – works.
Nerd Culture – works.
Notices – recognise it now that I’ve seen it.
Personal – works.
Pictures – works.
Programming – recognise it now that I’ve seen it.
Projects – doesn’t. (huh? Duke Nukem had a project? Or are you implying that your projects are vaporware that never see the light of day? I wouldn’t be so harsh…)
Random Thoughts – recognise it now that I’ve seen it.
Rants – works.
Stolen Pixels – works.
Tabletop Games – works, but its a bit small and fiddly – a single die might be more, well, iconic.
Video Games – works (though there’s not much to differentiate between this and the Game Design one. But then I’m still not sure how you get game _design_ into an icon, so good luck with that…)
Icon design is hard, and in many cases “recognise it now I’ve seen it” is the best you can hope for, so I’m not complaining, just giving feedback. And of course all of this is just what worked _for me_.
Like the new layout, but I agree that the comment text is a little too close to the left side of the comment box. The spacing here (in the comment text entry box) looks fine, though.
Love the new look, the new banner, the fact that you’ve eschewed tables for css. Great work. Looks great on Safari for Mac, too, by the way.
I see now that the banner at the top is actually a bunch of clickable icons. I love the look, but you should add popup text (link text, really) that explains what category corresponds with each icon. Most of them at present don’t mean much to me, let alone to a new visitor.
Looks good to me, though I agree with earlier comments about the 1st comment in a thread needing a bit of padding on the left so the text doesn’t abut to the border.
The dice roller is goofy, though. Comment page one counts from 1 to 87, but page two runs from 51 to 80. That does total up to the 117 comments that existed when I posted, but starting at #51 on page 2 isn’t correct.
Looks like page 1 doesn’t have 50 comments, but 50 “first” comments. The replies aren’t counted, so page 2 will only start with comment 51 if there’s no nested replies on page 1.
I’m not a fan of the comments starting off on the most recent page. Other than that, and comments having no left margin, Everything seems fine to me.
For me (Firefox 3.5), it’s not that the comments have no left margin. It’s that a few left pixels on the entire page are cut off – the left side of avatars, any left margin on the text, etc.
But I really like the theme aside from various bugfixes. Thanks for making the comment dice smaller!
I nearly had a heart attack when I opened the site.
First, the good: Overall I like the changes, and the category buttons along the very top of the page were the first thing I noticed, looks good.
Now for the bad: I don’t really like how the comments start off on the most recent page, rather than the first. It’s not a big deal, but it was confusing at first. There is also something wrong with the required field asterisks, they’re outlined by white boxes, looks funny, the other things I’ve noticed have already been thoroughly covered by others but I didn’t see this mentioned.
Overall: It’s a nice change, I especially like the darker gray background.
Agreed that not starting on the first page is a confusing choice.
My one and only complaint: comments should start at the first one, rather than the first of the latest page.
I was kinda confused why everyone was posting at 9:30~ when the update’s been up for a couple of hours already till I noticed I was on the second page of comments.
Speaking of time, is there any way for users to set their time zone so they aren’t confused as hell as to how people are posting from the future? (it’s 8:13 here, which means I’m tired and can’t think till I wake up more)
EDIT: Seeing as others have already mentioned my nitpick, I’ll instead suggest that making the dice large enough to read could help; right now they’re too small to make out what the number is supposed to be.
I generally like it. I’m not a big fan of the font, and like some people have said already the comment text is a bit too close to the left. The replies to the comments however seem fine. The off-center thing will take some getting used too,. I like the general theme though and am a huge fan of the nested comments.
Looks Great
One small complaint, comment pages are shown newest page first, but the comments are shown oldest first in the page, a little confusing..
paging the comments makes it a hassle to see if some else has already posted a similar comment.
I don’t see how that is more of a hassle than reading 100 comments in the first place…
Overall the new theme looks great. Most of my minor annoyances have been already mentioned: too small padding, the missing comment numbers and too dark links on the top. These aren’t too serious though. The thing that troubles me the most is that when you click the comment link, it takes you to the _last_ page and not the _first_ like you’d logically expect. It also makes reading the comments in chronological order more difficult (“What? There was a first page also?”)
But no, I’m not freaking out:-)
EDIT: and of course there was already a mention about the comment link on the _first page_ of comments that I didn’t read before posting. Maybe this proves my point, or maybe it proves that I’m a blind idiot…
My only request is that you add a CSS hover attribute to the picture boxes up top (the alt text is too slow to pop up). I didn’t recognize a third of them.
Wow Nice!
Overall I like this new theme. But the comments…As if starting from the last page wasn’t confusing enough, the nested comments make following the discussion more difficult than it needs to be. I much prefer to read comments in chronological order. I also don’t like the black text on dark gray background comments have.
I really like the new site layout, with the commonly mentioned exception of the lack of left-side padding on top level comments.
I also agree with the people who say that the category list at the top just seems like background, not like click-able stuff, but I have to say that I really like it that way and don’t think you should change it.
[Edit] Okay, I forgot something. I think that the dice on comments are WAY to hard to read.
This post is just to check if your edit feature works on the iPhone.
Nope, It’s not possible to edit comments with an iPhone. Now, I can’t say that I personally care, since the chances of me posting a comment from my phone are slim to none and the compound chances of me then wanting to edit said post might as well be zero.
It should be pointed out though that while I don’t care there are 43 (42.48 Q1 2010, pretty much 43) million iPhones on the market and another 20 (at least, that’s a sep. 2009 figure) million iTouches on the market so it’s reasonably likely that SOMEONE will care, eventually. I don’t know the likelyhood of it actually coming up nor do I know how much of a point it is to check if a client will support the Ajax editor before running it, but I thought I would point it out for you.
I don’t care about colors or spacing, but I do care how things look in links, and the text doesn’t seem to wrap there any more. Maybe you don’t care about text browsers any more than you care about IE6, in which case I’ll figure something out, but now you know.
Wow, I’m a huge liar. Things look great if I don’t have half my window covered by a different window. Way to replace tables with something nicer. I also do like the way the site looks in normal browsers.
I think the nested comments are an excellent idea and I can already see them working. Personally I have always loved the gray theme and think it works great. The category icons at the top really do look great.
All in all, I think the new theme is a total improvement and you get my vote to leave it the way it is.
The only complaint is the paged comments, but I understand the need.
EBBEH! EBBEH! WHAT HAPPENED?!
Oh… wait. Never mind.
:-)
It’ll take some getting used to, but that’s fine.
(The one thing I’d actually make a meaningful comment on — the asterisks’ backgrounds — has already been mentioned, so never mind.)
I like it!
1st: What a stupid new theme, you’ve betrayed everything this site was aboutblablablabla… (sorry, need to meet some expectations here)
2nd: new theme? barely noticed it :) Seriously, I kinda miss the big foto of you with “dork” pointed at your head, but I understand that the effect wears off at some point.
3rd: I would have been nice to make the new formatting more scaleable (as in: I scale my browser window, the content squeezes in to match the window width), but after 13 hours work, I won’t demand that you make all the older posts compatible to that
4th: My opinion on the order of blog posts is that it’d be easier to maybe have the oldest posts on top in the archive or when following the “older posts” button. That makes it easier to navigate them in chronologic order. But the discussion about that has concluded a while ago and was long enough, so maybe I should have said that earlier
5th: breaking the comments into pages … the comments on the not-immediately-visible pages will be read less and thus some things will be repeated more often than they were already, because older posts are easily overlooked. I’d like for all comments to be visible at the same time — maybe via a separate link? Not everyone wants to read all 700 comments about the last DMOTR strip, and the comparably few people who do won’t break the server.
6th: I do like the category chooser at tht top, that’s a really good idea. Only maybe the single icons could be separated visually some more.
7th: Yay for technological progress! If it makes your site able to bear more visitors without demanding a bigger server, that’s fine with me.
Have fun,
Zak
RE: #3
I would like this as well. Specifically, I’d like there to be a bit of space on the left side of the text (on the front page and on individual posts) regardless of window size… having the text start one pixel away from the edge of the window makes it harder to read. Yes, I can fix it by maximizing my browser, but I hate it when websites make me maximize my browser to read them properly, because I habitually leave a couple of inches to the left of my browser window so that I can see what’s going on in the window underneath it (a MUD that I idle on a lot–I may not be doing anything much but I like to know if someone says something to me).
(This lack of space also cuts off a bit of people’s avatars on comment pages.)
On the plus side, hooray for not stretching out EVERY comment horizontally to match the widest comment. I see somebody already posted a really long link that stretches out the page and gives it a horizontal scroll bar, but the comments remain readable without sidescrolling! Please keep this aspect. Too many designs fail to take this into account and get all messed up the minute someone posts a long link, or an extended “AAAAAAAAAAAA” or whatever.
I don’t like this stylish new-age sleek theme.
I liked the old one, it looked simple and appealing. I advise you to give an option to chose old theme for people who prefer it.
Looks great, Shamus- well done.
The new site theme looks awesom, Shamus! The nested comments are a great feature, also.
I’m not so keen on the paged comments, though, but if we have to do that: the more per page, the better.
I accept without comment :)
Looks good, I’m normally one of those people who grumbles (usually inwardly) about any layout changes on sites I visit, but I like the changes you’ve made here.
I think it helps that although you changed the layout, the colour scheme has stayed virtually the same. often when sites change their theme, they tend to go all out and change everything, which makes it such a surprise and is probably what brings out the automatic “don’t like it” reaction in many people.
I will add my message to this stress-testing of the new layout.
Note how people reply to message #51, thinking it is the first. Wonder if it will be the same for message #101…
(In other words: I too vote for showing the first page of comments first, although I do understand the arguments for showing the last page.)
Love the changes.
‘Nuff said.
Looks purty! But I agree with most others’ nitpicks (secret dropdown menu, left margin breathing room, comments starting on page 2, etc.). I’m at 800×600 res. on Firefox 2 and it’s still all readable. So that’s good to me.
The new theme has many positive attributes, which I will entirely neglect to mention. :) Moving on….
I agree that the nested comments are a lot less cool in practice than they sounded. With no easy way to spot the newest ones, it’s pretty well guaranteed that I’ll never see a new reply to an older comment. I doubt that it’s technically feasible to turn this into a full-fledged forum that keeps track of what I’ve seen and color-codes accordingly–so I’d suggest just dropping the comments back into linear mode. Besides, a nesting limit of five (or any other number that’s reasonable in the 600px context) is so small that it’ll limit the “long, esoteric side-discussions” approximately as severely as the old betcha-can’t-find-the-next-related-comment system did.
If the nesting must stay, then is it at least possible to have the comments numbered chronologically, so that comment numbers won’t constantly change? (Er, that is, won’t change any more than they ever did?)
And if that’s not feasible, then you might consider just putting some random dice at the top of each post for decoration, rather than making them count anything. In the current setup, the comment number is basically meaningless anyway (which I assume is why you’re not displaying it as text any more), and purely random dice would be more interesting visually since they wouldn’t be 99% d20’s. (I still miss the old days when the dice roller wasn’t programmed to use a “20” die whenever possible….) The dice next to “There are now 144 comments” could still be a counter, of course.
Unrelatedly, I also agree that the oldest page of comments should be displayed by default, and that the number of comments per page should be set large (maybe 200-300? then most posts would be unaffected), and that the category buttons at the top of the page don’t look clickable. Also, I wish the background colors were darker, but that’ll always be controversial….
I like it well enough. It works nicely in Chrome.
The icons on top are a little dark, and the gradients are a bit too dark, but that’s just an aesthetic complaint, not a usability one.
Nested comments are great… but it would be nice to have an option to collapse a discussion. (Nice, but unnecessarily complex, I suspect.)
I like it, Shamus, although I think the icons at the top need to be “lit up” as the base and then “darken” when you hover your mouse pointer at them, it’s too hard to tell what is what when they’re dark and then light. I also prefer a bright white background, but I can hack this pale gray.
I do agree with Tesh that the gradients are too dark, though.
I actually like this a lot, Shamus. Retains its old feel, but seems to have more functionality. (I do agree about the top icons staying lit, and darkening when you hover though–them being both small AND dark makes it almost impossible to see.)
I do thank you for retaining the old…gray/pearl color of the site too. Its so, SO much easier on my eyes than plain white.
Thumbs up from me! Great work!
Email subscription for new comment notification would be a nice addition, and would solve the problem of being unable to find or notice new comments tucked away in a nested thread. There are a few WordPress plugins that do the job. It makes me much more likely to return to a thread, and it also means that the conversation can re-ignite from just a single comment on an older post.
Looks nice in Opera too, in case you wondered.
Also, threaded comments FTW! It would be nice to have a way to “fold” a comment branch and hide it from view, but I guess that is NOT easy…
Skipping all the current comments:
I actually really like what you did, though the web designer in me would love to make little tweaks here and there. That said, the only things I’d recommend are setting the posts to be left-justified and possibly reducing the font-size a bit. This would make the content look a bit more neat while also fitting more text into the space.
But these are just things I’d do. They aren’t “rargh it looks terrible!” things. Overall, nice job. I especially like how you handled the categories. I may actually steal that for my own site since I’ve been wondering what to do instead of a clunky old drop-down.
I’M FREAKIN OUT MAN, I’M FREAKING OOOOUUUUTTTT!!!
Nah man, i love the new design of the site, good job…
So while this was a bit of a shock when I looked earlier, it’s a nice change. Also: technical details I mdon’t understand. Yay!
Someone’s probably already mentioned it, but the dice seem almost unreadable; weren’t they a bit bigger before? It would be nice if they were the same size as (or bigger than) they were previously.
I did a search through the comments on icons but didn’t see anything specific on this particular complaint. So without further ado, you had said that archives are now organized in descending order (newest at top to oldest). When you click on the icon links, the posts on that page are listed in ascending order (newest at bottom to oldest). Although I do prefer newest at top with things getting older towards the bottom, this is more of a consistency issue. So, do what you will with that. Obviously this “problem” happens when you click on the category links as well. If this is how you intended to have the layout work then feel free to ignore me completely. :)
Also, I agree with the prior comments that the dice counters need to be a bit larger. They are a touch too small when compared with the text size.
Chiming in with, “I love the new look and functionality!” :D
Though the paged comments make me sad. As you said, though, necessary. I can see it.
Overall, I think the new theme looks nice. I like the fact that Shamus’ reply comments are a distinctive color, and the header bar looks snazzy. I personally would like a darker color theme, or perhaps the option for dark or light, like it used to have a while ago. Also, viewing this on a 1680×1050 widescreen, there’s an awful lot of empty space on the page, but I understand that changing the column width screws things up.
I really like the new site design. Except for one teeny little thing. Personally I’m not at all a fan of hover text and especially not when it’s necessary to figure out site navigation. It’s probably an effect of the internet issues I’ve got with my provider (relatively low bandwidth (6 Mbps) and the flaky network router) but it’s not at all uncommon for pages to load incompletely for me which usually leaves me with text and such but the “fancy” bits like hover text don’t function. Granted, with your site it would only be a small annoyance anyway since I usually read new posts fairly quickly and don’t often archive binge but just a heads up on the hover text thing.
The comment area seems too narrow for threaded comments.
I can understand keeping the posts the same width, but seeing as the comments fall primarily below the sidebar anyway, shouldn’t it be possible to make them a bit wider?
Dunno if someone said it, but it looks identical in FF and Chrome. IDENTICAAAAAAAAAAAAL!
I didn’t read the plethora of comments (181 as of writing) but I like the new theme.
And youd ditched tables for the design, that’s a sign of character and good taste :)
I’m not really sure you’ll read this (if you do… there’s only so much minutes in a day), but please continue to use this theme. Or a slightly modified one.
Whatever, you made the change, and I like it.
Ludo
I like the new links icon. I am satisfied.
A few more comments:
1. Comment author and date can be smaller, and on the same line rather than two lines? The comment text seems to be very large too (and I’m running at 1920×1200 with no special font sizes).
2. The white line above “Reply to this” is a bit too thick, or maybe not needed at all. Similarly with the blue/grey-to-white gradient background on comments.
3. Initial comments and replies have a different left-padding.
4. I suggest replies should have a thinner border. Also, is it possible to have them a different shade of the initial post’s background? This would help to spot when an uninteresting thread ends when scrolling quickly down the comments…
5. The grey comment background is too close to the main background. It might look better as white?
6. Avatars have a 1 pixel border which jars with the 2 pixel comment border.
7. I notice a few people pointing out that nested comments make it hard to read things if you’re coming back after reading earlier, and also that the five levels of replies limits discussion anyway. I suggest replies, instead of being inside the initial post box, should be underneath but indented.
8. The dice roller is pretty and traditional, but is it really necessary? Without it you could have an option to sort comments by date (either newest or oldest first) or by thread.
9. Collapsing threads should be possible with a tiny bit of javascript. I’ve done a gazillion such expand/collapse pieces of code, cross-browser compatibility isn’t an issue and if javascript is disabled, well, they just won’t work.
Here’s a quick mock-up of what I’d like to see (apologies to Tesh and Jennifer Snow, I picked a random comment+reply) — obviously this is purely opinion so feel free to disregard it!
10. Oh also this “Post Comment” button needs some padding.
New layout! RAEG!
Honestly though, it looks good. I find the gradient on the comment boxes a bit destracting though. It might be better for it not to fade back into blue/brownish or simply be a solid colour.
I also don’t like the gradiented blue bar you use with the about author/best posts/archives and so on, but I can’t put my finger on why.
Just a quick note, I scanned through the comments but it doesn’t look like anyone else has mentioned it. The dice appear to have an extra d100 at the start. This can easily be seen at http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=407 where we have 101, 102 and 103 instead of 1, 2, 3.
I’d like to say that you did a very nice job. The colours on the nested comments seem a bit weird and inconsistent (too bright for my tastes), but overall the site is very easy to read, clean to look at, and best of all, functional. It might not be the prettiest web site I’ve ever seen, but being an engineer also brings a rational and use-savvy design mentality, which has plenty of value on a site where the content is important, not how nice it looks.
Loads very fast compared to old theme. Looks more modern. Nice work. Category buttons in desperate need of popup text, tho.
Shamus, I like what you’ve done with the place.
Two things, since you asked for comments:
1) The comment counter seems to be out by 100?
2) Could you please PLEASE stop your page from reformatting apostrophes into “smrt quotes”. I realise this is not a new thing, but this has bugged me for the last three years, and I thought it might be a good time to bring it up since you’re changing stuff anyway. :)
I like the new design for the most part… just one or two little niggles:
1. I like having the comment number visible as plain text next to the dice.
2. If you’re going to have nested comment boxes, then at least 2px of space between outer border and inner border would be better.
3. But I’d rather not have nested comments at all. It’s much easier to keep track of where I’m up to reading if everything is in chronological order, and following ye olde @#xxx links was pretty straightforward. (I don’t think there is a better design than that — email notification of updates doesn’t help you find your place, and changing colour to indicate unread comments requires user logins and browsing through every comment page to spot the new posts mixed in with the old. And it’d kill your caching.)
What would help with the linking thing is if each comment had a permalink url (easy enough, since they already have a # tag, it’s just not shown at the moment), and if the blockquote tag actually displayed the citation (which it didn’t do previously). Then you could still have a “reply to this post” but it’d just put in the appropriate blockquote tag with link to the earlier post. Kind of like how it works in the Escapist forums, for that matter.
Also: something that seems fairly new is that in the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin, whenever the seconds counter updates it seems to scroll the comment form up by a few lines, which is really disconcerting. Fortunately it doesn’t actually alter the cursor position so I can just keep on typing, but it’s really weird behaviour.
Oh, also: if you do want to persist in the threading/nesting thing, you might want to have a look at the “Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering” plugin (I think that’s what it was called). I briefly had a play with it back when I was experimenting with threaded comments on my own blog, before I decided that threading was the Work of the Evil One. The plugin lets you number the “sub-comments” as well as the top-level ones.
Generally I like it a lot, although a lighter shade of grey and fainter colours would be nice for a bit more contrast with the black font, and a wider column for the text, as it is currently using less than 30% of my screen estate. Am I supposed to use my 16:9 screen sideways?
We really could do with more than 70 characters. Also, it feels not centered, since the navigation bar is included when centering, but that is only visible at the very top and since the anorexically thin layout forces me to scroll until me mouse wheel bleeds, the comments are squashed to the left.
37 Page Downs to get to the end, and still two pages of comments to go? Seriously. Only two comments visible at the same time, which makes the threading very hard to follow.
You know what? I will just not read the comments, that solves the scrolling problem. The main text is only 3 “pages” long, which is still annoying, but bearable.
I am basically complaining about the things that were bad with the former theme too (except the grey). I like the changes.
You shouldn’t have a 16:9 screen if you want to do anything other than watching movies on it.
Just because the screen manufacturers find it convenient (ie cheaper) to make 16:9 ratio screens doesn’t mean that you need to succumb to their needs by buying them. If you are going to be reading writing text then get a screen with some height to it!
P.S. Did you know that a 16:9 screen is 11% smaller and 18% shorter than an equivalent diagonally sized “old-style” 4:3 screen? And yet the 16:9 screens are sold to us as “better”. Sucks to be us!
Oh, and nice site theme Shamus! Not convinced about the nesting of comments but I’m sure you will be getting plenty of feed back on that.
THe 16:9 is for games mainly, and because it was about half the price of everything else. I’ve got another 5:4 which I use vertically for reading pdfs and such. But you’re right, I would probably not buy another 16:9. But another 200 pixels, a font with 1pt less and no width sacrificed for the navigation would be awesome.
Who uses the navigation on a blog anyway? Nearly everyone always reads the current entries I presume and ignores the navigation 99% of the time. So it is not necessary for it to be incredibly prominently placed.
I like the new theme; I liked the old theme too. Neither of them got in the way; within that constraint, content >> presentation. Keep up the good work.
While I utterly despised the removal of the Chaotic Evil theme (the first time the site theme changed since I started following the blog) I actually really, really like the new theme.
I like it a lot.
Just wanted to say the new theme looks great.
Btw, 5 degrees of nesting is not much nesting space to have “long esoteric side discussions”. This is partly why I never jumped on the threaded comment bandwagon. Once you implement it, comment threads have tendency to “lean sideways”.
On my own blog I give my users a “reply” button that inserts a relative link into the comment box. This way you can easily jump to the parent post when needed.
Btw, you mentioned the @number format gets confusing when comments get deleted. How does the threading thing cope with comment deletion? For example what happens when you delete a root comment which has 100 reply sub comments at various threading levels underneath. Does the immediate child become the new root of the comment tree?
What if the root comment was a 1st level comment. Do the children get promoted to the first level as well?
I don’t know what happens with comment deletion.
The numbering is purely artificial now. I’ve hacked in my own code that just counts top-level comments. This is the only way to keep numbering working between pages.
The system is certainly a tradeoff, and people seem roughly evenly split over whether this is a good or a bad change. I’m not sure myself.
I think you could reduce the problems with indentation for threaded discussions by either reducing the indentation or increasing the horizontal space allowed for comments.
Since comments are usually below the navigation bar anyway, but currently are only using the horizontal space left of it: Could you _force_ them to be below the navigation bar and in turn allow them to use the space below it? That way an indented comment would not need to be narrower than its parent, because it is entirely moved sideways. That leaves room for much more than five levels. If you still hit the right border, you can either scroll sideways of finally decrease the width (which is happening by default now, anyway).
That way at least you can get rid of the five-layers limit. About being able to immediately see which comments are new: The luxury version would be having a switch, so each user can choose whether he wants a threaded view or a linear one. I probably have too much time anayway, so you won’t mind implementing this, I’m sure :)
Also: I’m still hoping you give us the ability to see all comments on one page. This is a small detail of course, that I probably wouldn’t cry about if it happened on any other site, but you invited comments, so there you go. You may ignore this and do what you like, and I’ll still be happy, as long as you don’t start to make me register and give you my credit card number in order to view your blog and leave comments…
Testing comment deletion. I will delete the parent to this comment.
It worked. When a parent is deleted, everything under it is promoted.
It partially worked; these comments are well out of proper place order by timestamp.
Edit: Also, this post is a “reply” to your it worked comment, but seems to have inherited parent status.
Gotta say that while some of this is nice, I really don’t like the comment nesting. I tend to read all of the comments that get posted on interesting posts, and while that used to take O(new comments) it now takes O(total comments), and since I don’t want to bother with that I’m going to miss all of the replies to early comments. That sort of thing really only works well when you can see what’s unread easily, which, as stated by other people, kills caching.
…And I somehow just posted above Shamus’s test comment that was there before I posted, probably because of him testing deleting the parent.
I like it, myself. Looks nice. And nested comments are pretty awesome too.
Feels a bit awkward… But I can’t pin-point anything yet that’s specifically “wrong” about it, so hopefully I’ll get used to it in time.
ETA: Also, I like the colors. Kinda dark and easy on the eyes, but still light enough that black text is clear and easy to read. And I personally like greys and blues.
I’m using Chrome, and the page looks gorgeous to me. I might even change my own blog’s theme to this, because I love how this theme looks.
EDIT: I missed how this is a theme you made yourself. Will you be making this theme available for the general public?
I love it. I would not mind less color with the comments, but this amount of color doesn’t kill me, so that’s not meant to be feedback so much as… preemptive positive feedback if you’re already considering changing the comments to be less colorful?
I guess I could say that I think the type could totally be smaller. Everything is certainly clean enough that readability shouldn’t be a concern. The type is coming through at something like 14 pt here.
Why, oh why, are you not using a caching plugin? WP-Supercache makes everything so much more server-friendly, by serving static html pages to most visitors (people who haven’t commented and/or aren’t logged in), and updating them when something new happens.
It has saved the servers I maintain many, many times.
And I see now in the last post that you indeed are (were) using SuperCache. I’m surprised it takes the site down, then. Interesting.
Interesting. I post a comment, and it appears above the two below it.
Looks as though the comment-deletion-promotion thing may have some bugs.
Bunny likey.
(Nothing actually useful to say… just wanted to show some support)
:)
Still adjusting to the new theme, but only real comment so far is – I miss the white background.
As for comments, I’ve only skimmed down the first page of comments. Yes, at 50 ‘base’ comments, it finally reached the page split – but there must be 150 – 200 comments on this page (with all the replies). So, that means that you could still end up with several hundreds of comments on a single page… doesn’t that kinda defeat the savings of splitting to pages?
Oh, now that’s weird (and feels really broken). Right below my fresh new comment, are two very old comments – part of your test to delete the parent comment. With the parent deleted, those replies which are much older than my new comment, shouldn’t really be flowing AFTER my new comment.
And I can only imagine the havoc you’d cause with the dice counters of other comments/threads if you deleted a much earlier parent comment (because now all the replies, which were previously unnumbered, are now given a number.) Hmmm…
It would also be nice if the time was formatted for the local machine. All times are listed in some american format, which means I have no clue when a comment was written. Use GMT! :P
It’s change. We fear change
I like it straight away (although it looks as though there have been some fixes already :-)
In fact I like it a lot!
And another …
… how about preserving the timezone and local time of the post? I didn’t post this at 5.13 am, it’s 10:13 UTC here!
Preserving local timezone of any particular comment requires having user-specific details. This is an enormous amount of overhead for very little purpose.
It is useful to have the comment posting times all on the same timezone (particularly for comment threads) so that you can tell when comments were posted relative to each other.
A PST (or whatever timezone Shamus is in) after the time should be enough?
I don’t mind the change at all, though I will also add my voice to those asking for the removal of nested comments. I think the thread would be much easier to follow if you simply added a system for easily linking back to older comments and/or quoting text from them. Threaded comments have never made it easier for me to follow a conversation, and they often do the opposite.
I’m really likin’ it. It surprised the hell outta me, but I like it.
I don’t know if it has been mentioned already — and I’m not dedicated enough to read through three pages of comments to check — but the links are rather hard to distinguish from regular text. Yes, they’re blue, but appear very almost-black dark blue on my browser (Firefox 3.5.7). The thin, sans-serif fonts don’t help. Maybe something in a lighter blue or some underline action or something?
The comments remind me of coloured marshmallows, which is totally awesome. I’ve always found it hard to follow long lines in nested comments on say, fail blog, the colours make it so much easier.
Also, I love your new game review icon.
This looks awesome. We’ll see how it holds up after everyone kicks the tires, eh? Big thumbs way up.
Yeah, have to say that this new site design is awesome. Usually i dislike changes to websites – but then I usually think they’re changed for the worse in some way. This is just an overall improvement.
Good job!
Please put some space between comment boxes.. Now the comment area looks too cramped
Looks spiffy.
Good effort reworking the site.
I really like the new layout, although some of the colors make my eyes hurt. That could use a little more work. :-)
Also, would you consider adding a “latest” icon? I visit a lot, and would like the option of seeing links to the last 10 articles posted, regardless of their catagory. This saves time trying to search every category for new content. Just a suggestion :-)
Edit: Just noticed the archives. That will work for now, but it would still be nice to have an icon with only the last 10 articles in addition to the archives.
Edit Again: or, you might just add a “last 10” option to the Archives. You can add it just under the “select a month” option.