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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Good things about this new theme:<\/p>\n
1) Nested comments<\/strong> – It’s always bugged me the @comment number<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n 2) Paged comments<\/strong> – Not crazy about this one, but it needed to be done. Comments will be broken into pages, which will<\/strong> have an adverse effect on long discussions. I haven’t decided how many comments per page, but I’m leaning towards 50.<\/p>\n