T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s that time of the decade again wherein I muck about with the site theme and annoy everyone. Today’s goals are:

1. Get rid of the goofy double-indent problem I was having with multi-paragraph numbered lists.

   For example, before the change THIS paragraph would have been indented from the previous one. That was dumb and goofy.

2. Clean up stray tags. Because of the way I’ve hacked away at this theme over the years, it’s accumulated a lot of cruft. Maybe at some point in the past I had a little doodad in a div box. Then I removed it. Because of the way WordPress is wired up, it’s really easy to get rid of the content and leave a <div class="now_useless_class"><div> behind. I’m always trying to track these down and get rid of them.
3. Fix the problem of comment coloring. Previously, all comments alternated between blue and silver, regardless of thread depth. That was fine for flat conversations, but as threads got increasingly complex you’d end up with a blue reply to a blue reply to a blue reply to a blue reply. You’d scroll several pages down and lose track of who is replying to whom. If you want to see a good example of the problem at its worst, then see this post or this one. Note that with this new theme in place you won’t see the blue-blue-blue reply chain anymore, so you kind of have to use your imagination.
4. Turn the comment dice into a sprite sheet. (I did not get this done. As of this writing, comment dice are disabled. It’s on my to-do list.)

My current solution to problem #3 is probably not going to last. I predict people will complain that it suffers from a bad case of angry fruit salad. Which is fair. But this rainbow puke is useful as both an illustration of the problem and a good way to visualize the tools we have to work with.

What we really want is to create a situation where no reply will match the color of the post being replied to. To do this, you should technically only need four colors:

• Everyone replying to a blue comment will be either silver #1 or silver #2.
• Everyone replying to a silver comment will be either blue #1 or blue #2.

Sadly, you can’t do this with the default WordPress setup. The only way to make this happen is to code your own comment loop. I did this sort of thing in the past, but it’s a time consuming pain in the ass that needs to be re-done every time I upgrade. Coding your own comment loop also creates a lot of performance worries.

So right now we’ve got rainbow comments. Other solutions are possible, I suppose. We could use ten different shades of blue and silver, but there are only so many distinct shades of each that are suitable as a background for black text. And one shade of medium pale blue isn’t nearly as easy to distinguish from another shade of medium pale blue as (say) green.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Site Theme”

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.

I meant to post a heads-up about this, but it totally slipped my mind. Sometime in the last 12 hours, this website was moved to new hardware. While the IP change sorted out, some of us were seeing the site on the new hardware and some of us on the old. So, there were effectively two copies of this site in existence, and which one you saw depended on whether or not your DNS server was aware of the change.

Thus, some comments were left on the old machine and are now lost forever. Sorry for the confusion. Since you’re seeing this post, then the problem is solved for you and no further comments should go missing.

If it makes you feel any better, this new hardware is really nice. I don’t know how it is for people visiting the front page, but on the backend it always took me about 10 seconds to load up the comments queue. That’s now down to one second.

So that’s cool.

Anyway, carry on. And just so this post doesn’t go to waste: Anything you’d like me to talk about in my weekly column? I have the next couple of weeks planned out, but it never hurts to have a sense of what people want to talk about.

Onward.

EDIT: The comment editing plugin is enabled again on a trial basis. We’ll see if it misbehaves this time.

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.