T w e n t y S i d e d

Yep. We’re trying the new theme again. It’s the weekend and all the performance problems are sorted out, so now is a good time to put up the theme and see what usability issues we run into. New themes always have a shake-out period as people point out the obscure pages and unexpected use-cases that I never could have discovered on my own.

For the record: I’ve tested this site on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and my Android phone. The site works full-screen on my 1080p monitor and it continues to work as I shrink the window down to postage-stamp size. It worked in all of those cases, but I know there are a lot of browsers out there and I can’t hope to test them all.

Known issues:

1. The main menu looks a little ragged if you’re viewing the site in portrait mode on a small screen. I’m not sure how much I care. It would be easy to fix by making the menu taller, but then the menu would be the length of the whole screen and you’d have to scroll down to get to the content.
2. The Twitter thing doesn’t work. I’ll worry about that later. It’s pretty low priority. I barely use Twitter these days except to announce when my site is down.
3. I dislike that the comment box is shown ABOVE the fields for name / email / website in the comment field. This is the default layout and requires custom coding to fix. WordPress insists this layout is better for usability. I have my doubts, but I figure I’ll let people discuss it and see if there’s a good reason to put in the work to put the comment box below the other fields.
4. At small screen sizes, footnotes and image mouseover text are automatically displayed by default. Footnotes appear at the bottom of the post, and mouseover text appears as a caption. This is because it’s hard to “hover” over an image or click those tiny footnote links on a mobile screen.
5. I just noticed this now, but the comments link at the bottom of the post is flush with the left edge, which looks a bit naff.

I’m sure there will be problems. Let me know in the comments. If you’re seeing something strange / crazy, please mention what web browser you’re using.

EDIT: Yes, I know it makes you type in your name / email every single time you post a comment. When you do a reply, it jumps to the bottom of the page rather than letting you reply in place. Also you can no longer edit comments. Sadly, these things are not related to the theme change. This is the fault of WordPress, which decided to force GDPR compliance on EVERYONE without asking. I can’t get stupid WordPress to save cookies for anyone. I’ve tried a bunch of different solutions and none of them have any effect. I’m still working on it.

EDIT II: Cookies should work again. Comment editing should work again. If you’re still seeing major faults with the site, make sure to hard refresh (Ctrl-F5 on most browsers) to force the CSS to reload. Browsers are shy about reloading that for some reason. I’m sure there are still problems with the theme, but the big ones should be solved by now.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The theme is back to where it was last week. I can’t work on it while the site keeps falling down. We’ll work on this later. In the meantime: Yes, I know a bunch of stuff is broken / missing, including search. No, I don’t know why. And like I said, I can’t do anything about it now. (It all works fine on my test server, if that makes you feel any better.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Programming is different from a lot of other creative endeavors because it feels good when you expunge your recent work. If I’m editing my book and I realize an entire passage is redundant, I don’t enjoy killing it. Without an editor pushing me, I might even leave it in. Same goes for when I’m making music. If I lay down a bass line and later realize it’s just not working, I don’t get a thrill from canning it. Likewise for texture maps and 3D models. If it’s something I made recently, then I hate to get rid of it.

For contrast, if I come up with a shorter, clearer, more elegant piece of code, then deleting the old code is pretty satisfying. Sometimes I get caught up in the desire to make the code as small as possible and mess around with small details that don’t matter, just because it feels good to have something happen in five lines rather than six. (It only counts if I’ve really simplified something. If you take the complexity of line #6 and add it to line #5 than you’ve made the code shorter, but not simpler. And you may have made it a little more convoluted, which is worse.)

For those of you browsing the archives from the futureI do wonder why you’re browsing the boring “Notices” category, but that’s your business., last week the site looked like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “You Hate It Already”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Last night I uploaded some updates to the site theme. A little while later, the site went down. On the control panel I could see my CPU and process usage were both pegged at 100%. I naturally assumed the outage was related to the changes I’d just made. I spent hours fussing with things, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I finally reverted everything and discovered that the problem persisted.

I reached out to support and they determined I was experiencing a DDOS attack, and the site update was unrelated. Lots of unrelated IP addresses from around the world were all hammering away at the WordPress login script, probably trying to brute-force using common passwords. It’s a hopeless effort on their part. My blog password is in excess of 128 bits, which means the sun will burn out before this botnet cracks it. Still, they managed to overwhelm the site and take it down. So I guess technically this wasn’t really a DDOS. It was a hack attempt that accidentally became a DDOS due to my site being a little undermatched for this particular botnet.

I’m reasonably sure this DDOS isn’t the first. You might remember my adventures with 1 & 1 Hosting. What I think was happening is I was getting slammed with this same botnet. Instead of notifying me or investigating, 1 & 1 just took my site down until the bots gave up and left.

I’m experimenting with a cloud service to distribute the load. This is supposedly a really good defense against these sorts of things. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see if / when this happens again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.