T w e n t y S i d e d

Yes, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about the stupid theme. Not to worry. We’re nearly done. As before, I’m putting this stuff up on the weekend when traffic is slower. Also: If something looks off then make sure to do a hard refresh (Ctrl-F5 on most browsers) before complaining about it in the comments. The problem you’re seeing might already be fixed and you’re just not getting it yet.

Here is a list of the major changes:

1. If the window is too short to display the menu on the left, the layout will switch to menu-top mode.
2. Many spacing and alignment adjustments have been made. Too many to list here.
3. 31 all-new daily background images! These will now fill the entire space behind the content.
4. The links for stepping through a series are now white-on blue, so they stand apart from the content more.
5. The promo cardsThe “From the archives” links to other content. have returned. You can see the full list by clicking on “Top Content” in the main menu.
6. Comment colors have been tweaked to make them easier to differentiate. It’s not the rainbow we used to have, but it has a little more variation than we’ve had for the past few days. I’m trying to balance things between people who complain that it’s hard to track the comment thread colors and the people who complained about the “angry fruit salad” look of the old rainbow colors.
7. The Twitter popup / link works, for all two of the people who care about that.
8. I’ve taken all the various scattered links to the Spoiler Warning posts and condensed them into this final library.
9. Comments waste a little less horizontal space on small screens. When the view gets to be narrow there is always going to be a trade-off between the readability of the comments themselves and the clarity of the comment threading. If we give more space to the comment text then there’s less space for the lines on the left when the thread reaches maximum depthFun fact: The max comment depth is 10 and that limit is enforced by WordPress. I can’t even find a plugin to raise it. As far as I can tell, the limit must be hard-coded someplace beyond the reach of plugins. Sadface..
10. Tightened up the graphics on level 3.

An additional note is that I’m changing the weekly publishing schedule a bit. The Diecast will still go up on Mondays and Sunday will remain my dumping ground for low-effort postsHi there!. My Escapist column, This Dumb Industry, my GTA retrospective, and Bob’s Witcher series are going to be shuffled around. I think I’ll do This Dumb Industry on Tuesdays, the Escapist on Wednesdays, and retrospectives on Thursdays.

So why do I keep messing with the theme?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Theme Adjustments”

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.

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.