Good afternoon, everybody. I want to give you all an update on a couple of major changes that we made today.
New Theme
The first is obvious. We’ve updated our theme again. We’ve updated it for two reasons. First, because you requested it a couple of weeks back using the polling widget in our sidebar (which, you’ll notice, is now under the “Asides”); and second, because some users (specifically, those using Internet Explorer) had issues with the way our previous theme constructed the three columns: instead of getting three columns, they got two, and everything that was supposed to be in the third one got stuck underneath the first, which made a REALLY long and REALLY ugly column.
For those who are interested in this kind of stuff, the new theme we’re using is called October Special, and it was created by Derek Punsalen over at 5thirtyone.com.
There’s are two things about this theme that I want to point out:
- The front page is now divided into two vertical sections, the upper section with a white background and the lower section with a darker one. The white background is for the latest post and the most commonly used widgets (more on this in a moment). The dark background is for the previous five posts, the less commonly used widgets, and a list of every category on Fluid Imagination.
- The three columns have changed. In the left hand column, you’ll find all the information related to the post in the center column, information such as when the post was published, who wrote it, where it was categorized, how it was tagged, and how many comments belong to it. In the right hand colum, are ALL the widgets.
Now, as far as the sidebar widgets go, the ones you see today may be in flux for a while. Because the last theme had two widget sidebars, we filled them up with a lot of neat things that don’t seem to fit into the new model, things such as a bunch of Flickr photos, a list of what books I’m reading, and a list of what songs I recently listened to. Furthermore, because the two places for sidebars are now distributed vertically (some on the white background, some on the dark), we may run into some issues when it comes to the top sidebar running longer than the top post, which leaves us with a bunch of white space between the end of the post and the start of the lower section, and that could get kind of annoying, especially when you want to look at the comments for a post, and you have to scroll a bunch just because the sidebar is too damn long.
The solution to this, of course, is to make the top sidebar relatively short. Which brings us to a question that I need you all to answer. What is the most important widget in your mind (i.e., which widget interests you the most)? Here’s the list of all the widgets we have installed on Fluid Imagination:
- Recent Comments
- Asides
- Democracy Poll
- Most Popular Tags
- Top Commenters
- Kyle’s Status
- Kyle’s Reading List
- Kyle’s Recent Tracks
- Kyle’s Flickr Photos
Personally, I could go with any of the top three. Recent Comments are obviously important, since Fluid Imagination is a community and this widget shows us what’s happening in the community. But I can also see putting them as the first widget in the lower section, since all the commenting takes place down there, in which case, I see the Asides most deserving of the upper section, i.e., the white background is for reading, the dark background is for talking. As for my reasoning regarding putting the poll in the top spot, it would be because that is the place (besides when you contribute posts) where you all have the opportunity to shape the site’s future, and putting it in the bottom section is almost like hiding it from view, putting power into the hands of those few who scroll down and look for it.
Honestly though, I can go for whatever you guys want, so leave a comment and let me know which widget you think belongs in the top slot.
WordPress 2.1
The second major update is that we’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.1, codename: Ella (after Ella Fitzgerald). Most readers won’t notice a difference, but those of you who contribute will see some changes in the backend. First (and most important), it’s got an autosave feature now. When you’re writing your post, WordPress will now automatically save it like every minute or so, which means you no longer have to worry about accidentally losing any of your hard work. Other changes include some AJAXy goodness that will make my job as webmaster a lot faster and smoother, an update to Akismet (9,377 SPAM comments caught since I first installed it!), and a bunch of other things, including 550+ bug fixes.
So, that’s what we’ve done today on Fluid Imagination. I want to thank Adam for helping me with a couple of the early decisions, and implore you to please leave a comment with any feedback at all, and especially with what widget you want to see in the top section.
Thanks everybody.
21 Comments
How about creating a last.fm group for all the regulars of FI, and making a group chart?
That’s an idea, but I wonder how many regulars actually use last.fm. I know you and I do, Josh does, Jamie did (but he’s minus the Internet now that he’s in CO), and Will might (no idea if he still checks the site, though), but that’s about it. Anyone else use it?
Oh, and Lex, you didn’t mention which widget you think belongs in the top spot. Mind letting me know? Thanks.
I dont like it…
hmmm… - i’ll have to get used to this one… - but… - if people are having problems with it… - i.e. - the internet explorer tick… - you should obviously fix it…
i would say the recent comments and the asides are the most important midgets…
Its weird, i think the popular tags should be moved or deleted because of the browse catagory section on the bottom. MAke the asides section bigger fior the people who do not come here all that much. If you miss a day you might miss something. Also there is are 2 search funtions.
Also I don’t care what your status is. ;)
There are two search functions? There should only be one, at the top right-hand of of the darker section.
(If you’re talking about the search in the top right hand of the whole site, that’s just a link down to the lower one).
Oh ok. Do you think it is needed?
A lot of people are used to looking for a search box in the top right of the page, so by putting the link up there, they can still find it.
Besides, it’s built into the theme and I’m not sure how I would change it if I wanted to :-)
am i the only one that sees a column of gray background on the right hand side on the page(all the way to the right), which makes it hard to read the stuff on the right side?
Well, I gotta say that I think a three-column design would be better. It’s not that this layout is particularly bad, but I’m just not a fan of the content-at-the-bottom paradigm. I mean, this layout has a ton of white-space to the left, and might as well use it. More, though I realize there’s a good regular readership here, I think that relegating all but the most recent post to excerpt status sort of fucks over the perceived chronology of the thing.
I hear you on the three-column design thing, but there just aren’t that many good three-column designs out there, and the ones I like are usually implemented weirdly so that Internet Explorer fucks ‘em up, and unfortunately IE users make up about 50% of our visitors (weirdly enough, we have more Safari users than we do Firefox users, and apparently, I’m the only one running Camino).
I’ll you what though, folks, since it seems that a bunch of you aren’t liking the new design: Use the polling widget up above and vote on this theme. If at the end of January, more people don’t like the theme than like it, I’ll go looking for a new one.
I think that the simple and clean look of the theme gives it a more “professional,” ::ahem:: established appearance than the last one, but I also prefer the three column view. I like the black/grey look though!
P.S. Kyle, I don’t like how your status is at the bottom of the page, I am highly entertained everyday by glancing to the left and seeing if you are going to the pub for free wings or having a boys game night. Ha. I don’t want to actually have to scroll (work at) to see what you are up to. ;)
Isn’t a widget a plastic carbonation ball that helps Guinness retain it’s draft quality when you purchase it in a can (or the new bottle)? Also I’m not sure about the Guinness Extra Cold, it seems like a bad marketing ploy. If I want a cold beer I’ll stick it in the fucking ice box…you know what I mean? If you ask me the best way to have a Guinness (or any beer for that matter) if you’re in a bar and aren’t sure about the cleanliness of the keg lines or how old the barrels are, just buy a bottle. Bottle’s are cheaper and they all taste the same.
I never understood people that buy the other Guinness, the old bottle that is made in Canada. It tastes like a black beer, there is no creamy head, there is no Widget. But that’s the same with most stouts that you drink from a bottle, they have a real heart-burn quality.
Every time I do a brewery tour of Maine and New Hampshire I make sure to go to the Red Hook brewery. They have probably my all time favorite beer, Black Hook Porter. It’s served like a Guinness, and if you’re a fan of that kind of beer you’ll be able to put back like 11 of those puppies. But watch out beer will get you shitty. Shitty like this new Fluid Imagination theme…
Oh well, aren’t you just a clever one :-)
Any specifics you want to mention so that I might have a chance to do something about them, or just an overall shitty quality that can’t be pinpointed?
For example: notice how Jess complained about the myStatus thing and then I did something about it. I’m also working on fixing the issue that Sam has with the gray bar. I haven’t really looked into putting more than the latest post up the top (as Alex requested), but I’m gonna try to put the TWO latest posts on top.
So, any specifics?
Actually, I like the grey white theme, but the orange doesn’t quite work for me. If you want to try a complimentary color put less yellow and more red (maybe) into the orange. Change the F and the I so they stand out a little bit (try a very pale blue/purple for instance) and lighten up the rest of the letters they’re too black. Think about adding some blue to the over all grey (might be too much silver)? I don’t know, those are just some thoughts for the design, they may not work.
As for the layout it would be nice to see some form of break in the columns, even if it were a thin line or grey on the outsides white in the middle. The rest of it I think I can figure out.
I like the change back of your status, this new look is growing on me..
That green is pretty cool.
green is better
Okay, Sam, quick update on your issue. I’m in touch with the theme developer and sure enough, it’s a bona fide bug. He’s gonna keep working on it, as am I, but in the meantime, there’s not a lot I can do.
If it’s really bugging you (as it would me), you might want to try upping your monitor resolution (1024×768 should work). If you need any help doing that, shoot me an e-mail.
And Josh (if you’re reading through this), as our resident professional programmer, feel free to take a look at the CSS and see if you can come up with something. You can recreate the bug by shrinking your browser window down so that the horizontal scroll bar comes up, and then scrolling all the way to the right. The smaller the window, the bigger the effected area.
I’ve pinpointed it down to the “body” selector. If you change the background color for the body, the color in the effected area changes. I’ve tried making the site fixed width, and while it fixed the issue, it ended up anchoring the whole site to the left-hand side of the browser, which didn’t look to good. I then tried making it fixed width and centering it, but I couldn’t figure out how to center it (I tried “margin-left: auto” and “margin-right: auto” but that only anchored it to the right-hand side).
So yeah, Josh or anyone else interested in helping me out, that’s the issue. Like I said, we can fix it by making the site fixed width and then centering it, but I don’t know how to do that. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.