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Front Page Tweaks

By tigtog on May 25, 2011

I thought a dedicated thread would stop this chat from cluttering up the Salon. As promised, I have taken some of your constructive criticism on board.  I hope the latest iteration of the front-page works better for more people. (Addendum: if you’re seeing anything purple in the dark box, please refresh your browser to call the new stylesheet)

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23 responses to “Front Page Tweaks”

  1. grace pettigrew
    grace pettigrew
    May 25, 2011 at 8:07 am |

    thanks for the numbers tigtog

  2. Lesley de Voil
    Lesley de Voil
    May 25, 2011 at 9:05 am |

    Purple on black in the box is *not* a good read.
    The rolling banner rolls too slowly.
    I miss seeing the number of comments near the title.
    Overall, hasn’t improved things much . (Sorry! – when I know how much work it would have been!)

  3. Lesley de Voil
    Lesley de Voil
    May 25, 2011 at 9:10 am |

    Oops. I see the comments tally is on the front page!

  4. tigtog
    tigtog
    May 25, 2011 at 9:12 am |

    @Lesley, if you are seeing purple on black in the front box then you need to refresh your browser so that it is calling the new version of the stylesheet.

    Also, there should no longer be a rolling banner of any kind (edit: oh, do you mean the header image? it does seem to be rolling slowly today)

  5. Jan
    Jan
    May 25, 2011 at 9:30 am |

    Thank you for all your hard work I find this new format easier than the last.

  6. Chris
    Chris
    May 25, 2011 at 9:46 am |

    Much nicer, thanks!

  7. Dave McRae
    Dave McRae
    May 25, 2011 at 10:10 am |

    ta for the addendum – ctrl-F5 refresh fixed it for me

  8. Russell
    Russell
    May 25, 2011 at 11:41 am |

    Maybe everything does come to he who waits: easy to see latest topics, with number of responses etc etc. Thanks.

  9. David Irving (no relation)
    David Irving (no relation)
    May 25, 2011 at 8:35 pm |

    I think you’ve nailed it, tigtog – best of all worlds. (Although I reserve my final judgement until I have to look at the site with Internet Exploder at work tomorrow.)

  10. Tyro Rex
    Tyro Rex
    May 25, 2011 at 8:54 pm |

    Yeah this is good, tig tog. Thanks.

  11. patrickg
    patrickg
    May 25, 2011 at 9:16 pm |

    Nthing I also like it a lot. :)

  12. Fine
    Fine
    May 25, 2011 at 9:29 pm |

    Much better now tigtog.

  13. Jess
    Jess
    May 25, 2011 at 9:46 pm |

    Hi TT, looking really great now but my browser (Safari) is still having trouble with the recent comments – they come up in the box on the right, but I can’t see them on the thread.

    I’m wondering whether it was a cache refresh problem but blowing away my cache files doesn’t seem to have made a difference. Any suggestions? I might hang fire until I can try the site on a different computer at work and will let you know how I get on.

  14. tigtog
    tigtog
    May 25, 2011 at 10:09 pm |

    Jess, as Jacques has explained previously he is aggressively caching all of ozblogistan so that pages get served quick as.

    The new LP template and him stepping up caching a few notches happened to coincide. It’s not the new template doing that.

    I think leaving a new comment will force a page refresh? Jacques will have to confirm.

  15. Ron
    Ron
    May 26, 2011 at 7:03 am |

    I must admit to having trouble getting used to the new format but that’s my problem. So I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned the banner alignment problem in the latest version of Firefox:

    http://twitpic.com/52h5rb

  16. tigtog
    tigtog
    May 26, 2011 at 7:18 am |

    Hi Ron, and thanks for the feedback. You are the first to mention it, and I’m also running the latest Firefox and not seeing it.

  17. Jess
    Jess
    May 26, 2011 at 7:42 am |

    Tigtog @ 14. Ah sorry, I thought it had been explained previously but couldn’t find the thread. Hopefully it sorts itself out soon.

  18. Ron
    Ron
    May 26, 2011 at 7:53 am |

    Hi Tigtog,

    yes, the banner has been like that for me since the change was made to the new format.

    I’ve cleared cache and all that sort of thing.

  19. tigtog
    tigtog
    May 26, 2011 at 7:53 am |

    @Jess, I’m cutting and pasting Jacques’ comments from the previous discussion for reference:

    [link]

    Caching. Ozblogistan is very aggressively cached on the server side, but Wordpress can’t, by design, support a write-driven cache update policy.

    What this means is that you will see pages get out of sync because they were cached at different points in time.

    On other hand, pages load as fast as the clappers for non-logged-in users (ie, almost everyone).

    You can check this yourself using the “view source” function of most browsers. Open the pages and scroll down to the bottom. You’ll see some comments inserted by the caching plugin telling you when the page was cached and in what format.

    [link]

    Hal9000 – refer to my comment further up. In general I am reluctant to dial back the caching because it speeds up every Ozblogistan site, not just LP.

    [link]
    It’s not FF doing the caching, in this case.

    Here’s how it works.

    Your browser requests a page. If it’s not cached, Wordpress gets called on to generate it. A compressed copy of the generated page is sent to you, but a copy is also saved to disk, in compressed form, on the server.

    The next time someone requests that page, the web server discovers that it has a copy stored on disk. Rather than generating and compressing it from scratch, it sends you the existing copy. This is substantially faster than the generation process — as in, up to a hundred times faster. Really, I timed it.

    Now, the caching system has some smarts to detect when comments are submitted, so that it deletes stale copies of posts where a new comment has been added.

    But it doesn’t have the smarts to detect that the front page would have been changed by a third-party plugin such as recent comments. And that’s why comment threads can get out of sync with what the ‘recent comments’ sidebar.

  20. tigtog
    tigtog
    May 26, 2011 at 8:00 am |

    @Ron, I’m out for a while so I’ll reply properly later.

  21. FDB
    FDB
    May 26, 2011 at 9:41 am |

    Yay!

    No more dark purple text on dark grey background!

  22. Lesley de Voil
    Lesley de Voil
    May 26, 2011 at 4:39 pm |

    Thanks for all the work,TT! I wasn’t going to comment re the positioning of the comments line in the blog version (at the bottom of the post *after* a page break line!) ‘cos I thought I was being unduly fussy, but I just now chose the wrong one – because today’s laptop screens are far too shallow to allow one to view more than 30 lines at the one time. IOW, the horizontal line at the end of the post looks like a divider between posts, because there is nothing between the comments line and the next title.
    FWIW, the top title (pace Ron @#15) is fine on my screen.

  23. furious balancing
    furious balancing
    May 27, 2011 at 10:43 pm |

    very nice.

    I tend to avoid sites that have any kind of animated content – my eyes/brain find it extremely difficult to deal with and I’m not sure why. Fortunately Firefox can be customised to stop most of it, but it didn’t work on that scrolling banner. This new version is very elegant.

    thanks to all at LP for their efforts.