Folks- I hate the gravatars. They may not last.
Second, I hate this facebook thing. I don’t care how many people “liked” it. If I need affirmation, I’ll go pet Lily.
Anything else that needs to be addressed? And before you ask, the paragraphs in comments bug is still there, because that is an addon.
Josie
Agreed on the avatars and facebook stuff. One of the things I appreciated about BJ was the simplicity of design and the ability to easily see people’s names so you could decide whether or not to read the post. The fewer things to clutter up the site, the better.
Mary G
Also not a fan of the gravatars. Everything else seems good.
ETA: commenter’s names could be bigger or in a darker font – I have to squint to see the light green in some conditions
Comrade Mary
I don’t like Gravatars following me around the web. On other sites, I can upload unique images for that site, but that’s too much work for a small site like this, I think. I’d rather go image free for fewer headaches all around.
John - A Motley Moose
Glad to hear the gravatars might go. Find them silly on a site like this. No other complaints other than I hate WP. Since the changes I would like to see are limitations in WP, there’s not much chance they will ever be addressed, so I guess I don’t have anything else to add.
asiangrrlMN
I am agnostic on the avatars, but I agree on the like thing. I don’t care for that. Other than that, the name being a different color for those without a website would be nice. Oh, and pics of Tunchie embedded all over the site would be nice as well. Other than that, it’s all good.
The Dangerman
No position on Gravatars.
Is it possible to thread replies (for an example, see The Mudflats)?
PurpleGirl
I like the gravatars but I can do without the facebook stuff. Otherwise I like how the site is looking. I like the larger font size; in one of the threads below I saw that others had commented on the size before me. Thanks for changing it.
arguingwithsignposts
don’t hate the gravatars if they were a little smaller and the comments were closer together and the commenters’ names were bold or something. The FB thing does suck, though. If you want something like that, you could have a “share” button so it wasn’t all about Mark Suckerberg’s borg.
ETA: Where are the blinking tags and rainbow colored dancing gifs?
Peter J
You probably should fix the email addresses on the right that are in clear text.
(And I would like to have a preview…)
freelancer
I like BJ without gravatars, but if they stick around, I’m sure I’d get used to it. Hell, I comment at wonkette and various others’ WP sites where they’re used uniformly, but we must preserve the dignity of this forum.
kerFuFFler
I’m with you on the gravatars going, but the facebook liking does seem like an easy way for people to share your posts. It’s not really just about affirmation.
sherifffruitfly
So get another add-on. Or hire a real programmer. Durr.
Regardless, the only remaining gripe I have is that the site loads damn slow now.
Carrie
I think it reads well, love the gravatars but agree about the FB thing, it tends to cheapen the posts.
Sapristi
C’est déjà fini pour les gravatars? Sapristi!
The Dangerman
@freelancer:
Fuck that shit ;-)
MonkeyBoy
@Stacy:
Since you are the one doing the upgrade, could you post a list on your website of what issues you are aware of and which of those you intend to fix? That could at least keep people from repeating known complaints.
I presume a bunch of what you are doing is creating a master CSS and then adding tweaks to it that depend upon specific browsers. At your site could you include a list of what browsers have been tested? Also I presume you are doing things involving changing plugins.
To all commenters voicing complaints:
Please indicate which browser and version of browser you are complaining about because things look different in different browsers
ALSO, be sure to refresh your cache if things don’t look right. In most browsers this done with Ctrl-F5 and Ctrl-Shift-R and Command-F5.
See Here for more info on refreshing.
asiangrrlMN
Damn. You’re good, Cole. You don’t like the avatars, and BAM! They’re gone.
cyntax
Avatars are shmeh. Can live with or without them, but Facebook is just annoying.
Barb (formerly Gex)
I’m neutral on gravatars, hate the facebook thing. I don’t want threaded comments, as someone above mentioned, but I think that has been explicitly rejected previously.
sherifffruitfly
@asiangrrlMN:
You don’t know whether avatars exist or not?
lols
Pretty sure “indifferent” was the word you wanted to dial up there.
Yutsano
@The Dangerman: I think we discussed threading before and decided it would get too cluttered.
With wifey’s position: agnostic on avatars, otherwise things look pretty good. Not noticing any major load hangups on latest version of FF. Half-tempted on trying IE to see if margin issue is finally resolved.
Bmaccnm
Agreed on the avatars and especially the facebook reference. I don’t care if anyone on facebook liked it, and my facebook stuff is for my clients, not my politics. Actually, i agree with Josie. I liked the simplicity of the old site. “Why, oh why didn’t you consult with me before CHANGING EVERYTHING. Sob.
Martin
LIke it better without the avatars. Still has too much white space between comments. Try this:
#comments ul li, #comments ol li {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #688848;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
Rather than the 40px bottom margin.
The Dangerman
Threads rejected already? OK, just as idea. I find it makes Mudflats more readable, but YMMV.
Edit: I don’t see the Facebook hangup; what am I doing wrong/right? Or has it already been dispatched?
BettyPageisaBlonde
This is even better. The slow down is probably the Facebook code. You don’t need it.
morzer
Gravatars fun. Facebook crappy idea.
licensed to kill time
Hahahahahaha! avatars no mas!
Really, I thought they gave the site a totally different look. Cartoon-y or something. Not….quite my thing.
dmsilev
Meh on gravatars. Either way would be fine, though I tilt a bit towards “no gravatars” just on page-loading-time grounds. The facebook/etc. stuff just adds clutter; eliminate it.
dms
David Fud
FYI: My chrome browser worked great before the changes, now it is a mess. Clean on IE, though.
arguingwithsignposts
Re: threaded comments: I like how they are on TBogg’s site. I know it’s FDL, but that’s the only place I read there. They don’t appear threaded, but you can click on the “in reply to” and see what the original comment was. kinda cool.
Lysana
The Facebook widget makes it easier for folks to share posts there, but if a person can’t open a tab and paste it into their status there, they clearly need remedial computer training. We can live without it if it’s hated.
As I noted in the last one, I liked the gravatars but am not worried about their going away.
As for other notes, can we please have the previous and next post links under the comment field show the titles of the articles? Just to be consistent. I said that in the last thread as well, but new thread is more likely to be read.
asiangrrlMN
@sherifffruitfly: Well, I don’t see them now, so how do I know if they exist! Agnostic is just my default position on everything. Heh.
And, I don’t mind the avatars over at TNC’s place because they are tiny and unobtrusive.
@arguingwithsignposts: I agree with you about this. I like clicking to see the original comment.
Chrome is fine for me.
arguingwithsignposts
@David Fud: My Chrome on mac looks fine.
ETA: Gravatars give Matoko_Chan something else to whinge about, so there’s that.
WyldPirate
LOL. The gravatars, are kind of cool, but I can live without them. I was having problems with them related to changing my email address from a bogus one to a real one anyway. I think that the change of the email was throwing me into moderation (Windows 7/Chrome 8.0.522)
The facebook shit can go. That crap is annoying on other sites when you hover over it. I just joined facebook a little over a month ago and I’m already finding it rather annoying
Benjamin Cisco
Looks like both the gravatars and the facey pagey thingy are gone already.
__
So it was written, so it was done. Rock on John Cole with your bad self.
Stillwater
I agree with you completely. No avatars. No FB.
Linda Featheringill
@freelancer:
:-)
Michael D.
I don’t mind the gravatars. But I would save the FB stuff and maybe do it like Sully does, with a share link. It’s less Facebooky.
The Dangerman
@Benjamin Cisco:
Zuckerberg is now only worth $29,999,999,999.99
I feel his pain.
Edit: everything looks great to me (FF latest) but kinda takes a dump at submiting a comment.
Edit Edit: But not at editing an existing comment. Interesting.
Martin
Oh, any chance you guys could work on the advertising sections? I’m not asking for fewer or different ads (gotta pay the bills) but it’s all ganked up with stuff. If we need to deal with ads, can that at least be clean and organized? What’s the search boxes in there? And why do I care about the sitemeter? Put it at the bottom where it belongs.
jeffreyw
Mmm…comment box still with right side margin intruding upon the right side column. And for some reason the font in the comment box is huge. Probably interrelated. I am using a text formatting toolbar…I wonder.. Ah, nope.
Older firefox build here, 3.5.9. later versions kill my beloved sidebar autohide addon.
suzanne
I am anti-Gravatars. They make the thread too long on my iPhone.
The Facebook thing… meh.
The text feels too big. I’m using Chrome 8.0.522 for Mac 10.6.
S. cerevisiae
Well if we don’t have the gravatars then I agree that the poster’s name should be bigger.
Chris J
The new comments code looks nice in IE but terrible in Firefox… at least for me.
BGinCHI
Avatar flirt was fun, but prob better not to have them.
Just Some Fuckhead would have posted his balls or something.
And yes, John, Fuck Facebook.
gnomedad
WP has addon bugs? Not surprised.
cmorenc
@Martin: Maybe reduce a bit the white space between comments, but some appreciable “white space” is needed between comments, or else the layout becomes not just cluttered and ugly aesthetically, but the effect is quite dysfunctional to readability as well.
Eric Shaw
Avatars suck. End of line.
jeffreyw
In the IE engine embedded within firefox now, the comment box issue has gone away.
Tim
Everything looks fine on both Firefox 3.6.13 and IE9 beta.
I use add-ons to block anything to do with FB and, surprisingly, I have no opinion on the avatars.
Edit: Trying to edit comments in IE9 is a challenge. When you hit enter to start a new line the entire comment vanishes.
The green font color on people’s names is hard to read I will agree.
Omnes Omnibus
This is looking better. Currently on Safari.
D. Mason
Thanks for ditching the avatars. Also the page formatting seems to be correct for me after whatever changes were made since my post on the previous thread. Site looks nice.
J.W. Hamner
Whatever iteration of the comments thing is atrocious. Wow. They are currently unreadable. Also, please space the topics better.
In payment, here is a cat.
EDIT: Ooooh… comments are fairly sexy now.
kdaug
C&P from earlier thread
kdaug
Gah, blockquote fail again.
West of the Cascades
Add the Angry Black Lady to the Blogroll?
cmorenc
Um…guess it’s a WORDPRESS bug. Geez, that’s a glaringly bad bug to have gone this long without WordPress fixing it. And no, there’s no valid excuse or worthwhile tradeoff I can think of to justify NOT having fixed it long, long, ago.
WaterGirl
@kdaug: double underlines between paragraphs still seems to allow blockquote to work, and they don’t show up in your post.
licensed to kill time
OH! xian on the last thread just made me realize what looks so weird! The numbers on the comments are so plain vanilla, and they used to be big and elegant. I want the elegance back!
Like this, remember? 79 (doesn’t translate, oh well)
Cap'n Phealy
Like!
LiberalTarian
Note to self: never jump on the new thingies during John Cole’s occasional upgrades/retrofits. I must always remember the fate of the avatar on Balloon Juice.
I have cut and pasted front page posts to Facebook and it is a pain in the wazoo versus simply sharing by pressing on a button. And it doesn’t make you a whore–being a whore makes you a whore, so if you don’t whip it out all over the place you will be fine. Is there something you can do to just make the FB button less obtrusive?
I’m good with the text size. I love being able to see.
J.W. Hamner
As of now I dig it.
arguingwithsignposts
dammit, if I’m going to moderation, just tell me. FYWP.
ETA: Cole, you have an error in your footer re the company that serves your blog (see far right corner)
Boudica
@Chris J: Comments look great for me on Firefox, but are a mess on IE8. Comments run all the way to the right margin, through the ads.
SIA
Everything looks fine on IE and FF 3.6. I hate Facebook and all it represents. Avatars are distracting from the clean effect. Hopefully I can figure out how to view easily on BB since that’s my primary source; going to try Opera Mini as recommended by Laura W’s friend.
And second West of the Cascades, add ABL to blogroll!
Maude
Glad avatars are gone.
Hate FB
The names in bold would be nice.
JSF would have a book as an avi. If he were here, he’d get that little joke.
Anyone wanna bet that the place will look like it did before in a few days?
FlyingToaster
Mac 10.6.6, Firefox 3.6.13, NoScript, CookieSafe, FacebookBlocker, Ghostery
Never saw the Facebook thing (between FacebookBlocker, NoScript blocking Facebook and fbcdn, Ghostery blocking FacebookConnect, etc, wouldn’t expect to, honestly), but I like it better w/o gravatars.
Font size fine now, but top line (name, time, yaddayadda) needs to be bolded. Currently it’s the same weight as the post in green and blue, which would look great on my office screen but is not sufficiently differentiated for my laptop. Which is where I usually read bj. So, second with the “bold, maybe a different green” change.
Michael A
Can the blogroll links open in the existing tab instead of automatically generating a new tab?
Quiddity
Facebook is insidious. I have a Facebook account but it’s for business, not politics. There are other Facebooks accounts I could use (developed by me for website clients) but I’m never sure what will happen with Facebook – since it appears to only deal with one cookie. I’ve seen instances where you are “stuck” with your last Facebook login/out account.
Violet
@Tim:
Agreed. The names are harder to read now than they were in the old format. It’s easier to read the names of those with websites because they’re in blue, but even those are harder than before. Font size maybe? Is it thinner/smaller?
THANK YOU for getting rid of the gravatars! I detest gravatar and avoid sites with it. I was hating the thought of giving up visiting Balloon-Juice!
Facebook, can take it or leave it.
PeakVT
More posts in the recent posts list.
Move the empty line from the top to the bottom of each comment.
Move the reply hover so it doesn’t cover text (perhaps on the same line as the poster/timestamp).
jeff
@Quiddity:
I was really worried about the FB thing, but John seems to agree. One thing that really bothers me is that I want my FB page to be very, very neutral on anything that might offend anyone in any way. I read an article in Scientific American that says I’m an old idiot to worry about such things…but surely there are still a lot of old idiots around.
Bruuuuce
Gravatars? Meh.
I always prefer a “post this to Facebook” link rather than a “like” link, just because it cuts my work (I don’t have to copy and paste a URL). Lazy, me? Sure. On the other hand, no Facebook link won’t make it any more work to post BJ links, so kill ’em if that’s the consensus.
asiangrrlMN
New NFL thread, Cole? kthxbai.
Dee Loralei
Comment thread hard to read on my iphone. And please bold or embiggen commenters name in all formats. It’s much easier to skip over the known idiots if I can see them coming. Other than that it looks good.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Yow. Who pumped the blog full of HGH? I thought my eyesight had improved all of a sudden.
(I’m on FF. Sorry to say the site looks like the ass zit that kept Limbaugh from serving.)
Ellen
What’s with this really dense type layout? Please! Insist on line spaces between paragraphs…at a minimum!
Quiddity
I’d like to add that, whatever happens, John is dealing with a lot of stuff and it’s a hassle to get everything right. So Kudos to John for the hard work.
Tattoosydney
Safari on IPad: everything looks pretty!
billgerat
I don’t understand fixing things that weren’t broke to begin with.
ChrisNBama
What the hell are gravatars?
PeakVT
Also, too: javascript links are very, very annoying. CTRL+left click works just fine and has for years (in Firefox). Now I am forced to deal with a new tab right away instead of going to it at my leisure.
BruceFromOhio
No loss on either, though the gravatar thing was fun for about 5 minutes. I’m looking for Winking Blue Potato to show up on the arena rock circuit.
ETA: Links that open in new tabs would still be nice.
arguingwithsignposts
@Quiddity: John hired someone to do the heavy lifting on most of this stuff, just fyi.
soonergrunt
Looks much better in firefox 3.6.13. IE 9 beta still shows text from comments running off to the right under the right sidebar and continuing off into oblivion, possibly out the fucking window, across the front yard and into the streets. Still working on getting the new pie filter working, but that’s on me.
scav
Liking the current incarnation. Crome. Tidy, fast and neat. — an solid multi-purpose aspiration, not that I see much of it in my life. Will now disappear in order to come back and find everything altered beyond recognition once more. The former Flying Pea.
scav
@ChrisNBama: The angels that tug GWB’s pants down and make sure the toast land butter-side down.
TaMara (BHF)
Wow, go a way for a little while and John kills the avatars. No trial, no appeal, no mercy. I can live without, but still need the commenter’s names to be bigger or bolder. They are very hard to read in comparison to the comments themselves.
EDIT: And replies are still getting WP error and having to be posted several times before they take.
soonergrunt
@soonergrunt: Removing Compatibility Mode from IE 9 seemsto work with the site now.
And no sooner do I enter that, than the fucking ‘run the comments off to the right off into oblivion’ is happening again with IE 7, 8, and 9 beta.
James Hare
Like buttons are the spawn of satan. Die like button die.
licensed to kill time
I never saw the facebook thing (FF 3.6.13 + NoScript) so was slightly puzzled when folks were talking about it.
So many things have changed today, so fast. I notice that taking the gravatar stuff out makes my tab refresh much faster.
I like the new layout now that I’ve gotten used to it a bit. But now that I’ve remembered how the old comment numbers looked (grey, soft, curved, elegant, larger) these new numbers bug me. There, I said it again.
Thank you John, and your blogmistress too! for all the hard work and responsiveness to comments.
Renie
I use IE 8 and Windows 7 and get comments running into the right hand side column. If I refresh several times it eventually goes away. Not sure if IE8’s compatibility feature causes this. Green color font alittle light for reading.
13th Generation
Basically, except for some smallish code fixes, seems like everybody liked it the way it was. If it ain’t broke and all that..
fordpowers
I like the idea of being able to easily share posts on fb or even the tweeter for that matter.. But i agree about the liking it. Thats stupid. no one cares.
Theres easy ways to share + track those too:
http://sharethis.com/
http://www.addthis.com/
and like 100 others.
ruemara
Don’t care. Have FB, don’t need in on BJ. Otherwise. Like the clean neat, modern font look.
gogol's wife
I hate to complain since I get so much enjoyment out of this blog. But on Firefox it’s now unreadable. On Safari it’s better, but it was much easier to read in the old format (especially commenter’s names). I guess there were some problems that had to be fixed for some people, but it seems to have created just as many new problems for others of us. Comments now look cluttered with all these different colors. Before, you immediately saw clearly who was commenting. Now you have to kind of search for it — the number of the comment is more prominent than the commenter’s name. ETA: Thanks for getting rid of the avatars.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
The “Categories” drop down is so wide that the scroll bar is invisible. Need to set up a max width that is no wider than the right column.
ETA: Firefox on Ubuntu.
Joshua Norton
@Renie: It’s definately a IE 8 bug. I had the same thing, even in compatibility mode. It drove me nuts. Now it seems IE 8 friendly and a lot cleaner looking.
Thumbs up from me.
suzanne
Also…. why are there “previous post” and “next post buttons at the bottom?
jnfr
If you get rid of the “Like” thing, consider using that “Share” option (AddThis, I think it is). Which isn’t about affirmations, it just makes it easier to post links elsewhere.
FWIW, I use Firefox and the site looks perfect on my machine.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Renie: The other day, before the change, it looked to me like IE’s compatibility mode was causing the problem.
Quiddity
@jeff: I’m tired of hearing that Facebook complainers – like me – are some sort of Luddites. I don’t want to pull rank, but I’ve been in programming at all levels for decades and Facebook is not your friend. It’s opaque in the extreme and is deliberately designed to suck in data that you thought might be private.
Here is an example of why you have to be on your toes:
I login to Facebook as [email protected]
Say I want to find people. There is a Find Friends tab and right at the top of a list of email servicers is Yahoo, and the displayed field is [email protected]
Click on the Find Friends button, and what happens?
A Yahoo-agree-to-share box pops up, saying that “You agree to share the following” (email contacts), but look closely and for what Yahoo email account?
[email protected] (Yahoo is probably looking at its cookie, which was last set during my personal email session)
And if I click Agree, then my personal contacts get imported, and who knows what happens with that? (I’m clean, but consider someone with drug recovery email contacts and other highly personal elements that could be exposed.)
This problem is browser and Windows-OS independent (I’ve tested this). It’s crap programming. Or is it? Most people are not going to be alert to the boatloads of data that are being aggregated by Facebook. I don’t understand why there isn’t greater resistance to FB.
The BigotBasher
Some very good news from Kos.
The US electorate already has buyers remorse. In a big way.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/16/936641/-Democrats-erase-the-2010-Republican-electoral-advantage
MikeJ
@suzanne: I like ém there, but I hope that they’re context sensitive (i.e., the next shouldn’t show up without a next to go to.) Better if it had the post title like those at the top.
And please,please,please,please get rid of the javascript around links. Yes, it will take me 30 seconds to write a script to fix it, but it will only fix it for me and I’m incredibly lazy.
xian
it’s not affirmation, gramps, it’s distribution.
p mac
Looks great now! The facebook thing was really annoying unless you were logged in. I never did see the gravatars, thankfully.
As for everything else, it is much, much better in IE8 (and IE9) now. No more need for compatibility mode, no more hit-or-miss on loading the comments, no more disappearing main page while loading error-prone ads.
JD Rhoades
I could have lived with the gravatars, but I agree it looks better without them. FB “like” button? Nah. Don’t need it.
Evolved Deep Southerner
Even though I spent a little time this afternoon going out and finding an avatar to replace that hideous piece of random shit I was assigned, I’d agree: Better without them.
And I’m militantly anti-Facebook. I have no FaceBook presence; too many old girlfriends on there – and that they’re so “into” facebook, as women in their late 30s and 40s, speaks volumes as to why I married another anti-Facebook person. But if you keep it, hell, it makes no difference to me if you think it’ll build your traffic. Seems like bait for the shallowest and dumbest of all possible trolls to me, though. I base that only on that infinitesimally small sample of old girlfriends who live on FaceBook.
Todd Dugdale
The “Balloon Juice” link at the top (header) no longer works.
jc
Chrome on my Macbook Pro is crap. Really crap.
Mac OSX 10.5.8
Chrome 8.0.552.237
Although, chrome updates itself, so in this case I have the ‘up to date’ version.
ABL
Yeah! Add me to the blogroll or I’m bustin’ capz.
Add a share plugin for the twitterz and facespace — it’s mo’ betta than “like.”
Evolved Deep Southerner
Now I know all of you are reporting that it works good in Internet Explorer now, but I just switched out of FireFox to IE and I’m looking at it now – in IE – and the comments are still running out to infinity out the right-hand side of the comment boxes.
What am I doing wrong?
ETA: And as soon as I posted that comment, boom, it looks OK now.
FlipYrWhig
I’ll check back in again later. Looks good on my office machine (Windows) but my antiquated home Mac was having all kinds of trouble earlier today.
Violet
Running FF 3.6.13. When I click on a link in a comment, the URL is listed as a javascript and it auto-opens into another tab. If I right click, the “Open Link in New Tab” and “Open Link in New Window” options are not available.
A link in a front page post DOES have both those options available, but not ALL links in the FP posts have those options. It seems intermittent.
Does this have to do with a setting in my browser or OS or is it B-J? I’ve checked in IE 8.0 and it seems the same as in FF.
WaterGirl
@Violet: Same here and I’m using Safari 5.x on the mac. It’s a BJ thing and I’m sure they will get it corrected.
Edit: what TooManyJens said in the comment just after this one.
TooManyJens
I’m reposting my comment from the end of the other maintenance thread because I assume everyone has jumped ship to this one.
@TaMara (BHF):
Seconded. Also, the green and blue fonts are just too light in general—not enough contrast against the white background.
Also, please don’t force links to open in a new browser window. What the people who ask for that don’t seem to understand is that you can already open links in a new window/tab if you choose to. If the blog authors force links to open in a new window/tab, those of us who hate that have no way to not do it.
I also wish the “reply” pop-up thingy worked on my iPhone. I liked the old (really old, now) reply button better, where there was just a regular arrow in the header of every comment.
I just noticed the “Previous post” and “Next post” links at the bottom of the thread. Thank you! That’s a big help on my phone.
We still can’t mention soshulism.
(Mac OS 10.6, FF 3.6.13)
Evolved Deep Southerner
Posting another comment to see if it “comes back.” Nevermind me.
Evolved Deep Southerner
Nope. Didn’t happen that time. Switching back to FireFox.
Gustopher
I like avatars in general. I recognize them more than people’s names sometimes, and all the trolls tend to have distinctive ones that are a quick indication to skip the post.
Alas, they were here and gone before I noticed.
FlipYrWhig
I don’t see any green fonts.
henqiguai
Yeah, get rid of that javascript wrapper around links; as someone else has said, I want to open a link to a new tab and navigate to it in MY sweet time, not RIGHT NOW. Too harsh ?
Quiddity @102: it’s a deliberate data grab on FB’s part.
henqiguai
Okay, what’s up with the light gray font (commenter name and datetime) on a gray (ivory) background ? Go back to the green, if you must, but give up the DAMNED NEAR INVISIBLE gray on gray.
jinxtigr
If you don’t see the green fonts, they can’t eat you… don’t see the green fonts… don’t see the green fonts…
I liked the avatars simply because I already had one handy, which I’d drawn myself. Most people won’t have that luxury, and non-cartoons don’t really look good in Gravatar, so nothing of value was lost :)
I don’t use Facebook so I don’t give a crap what you do with it…
Whee, the site’s changing even as I post. It’s like riding some demented wordpress carnival ride. And WHOAAAA as the username suddenly stretches out and takes two inches of vertical screenspace :D
henqiguai
Hmm. Slightly darker gray font on the name, two blank lines then a much smaller font on the datetime and link line. I’m going blind here, and both hands are up on my desktop…
p mac
@13th Generation: That just isn’t true. It was absolutely terrible in IE–had to actively block tons of ads to make it load at all, and it still would come up blank about one time in two.
It is much, much faster and better now.
joxn
OS: Win7 64 bit.
IE9 Beta: for a while the comments were running off into the gutter, but a page reload fixed that. Previously the Balloon Juice front page would crash my IE9 installation completely about 50% of the time; we’ll see if this problem reoccurs. Font colors for posters’ names are light green and light blue.
Firefox 4.0b9: Looks great. Font colors for posters’ names are light grey and light blue.
Chrome 8.0.552: Front page layout completely messed up; comments page layout completely messed up. Primary symptom is that the sidebars now appear at the bottom below the main text; also, too: the line leading is too tight (or the font is too large), font colors are not being picked up, and the styling on li and ul tags is not being picked up.
Violet
@WaterGirl:
I hope so!
Agreed! That reply button was the best. The current one is a pain because it’s not always visible and if you are trying to copy text near it, you end up copying the word “Reply” as well. It looks easier to avoid doing in this version than the previous one, but it’s still kind of a pain.
Anne Laurie
@suzanne:
Yay!
(Testing)
hamletta
Looks pretty good! Mac OS X 10.5, Safari 5.0.2
I’d just move some whitespace around: Datestamp on posts is too far away from name and too close to post.
Also, the ( – ) before the datestamp is extraneous. I would drop it.
Glad you dropped the FB stuff before I visited. I’m on an old G4, and even with Leopard, it bogs down page loads something awful. Going to Huffington Post is almost unbearable. For reasons other than the content. ;-)
TooManyJens
@suzanne: Because that way you don’t have to scroll back up to the top to get to the next post. It’s helpful on phones, for instance, where scrolling through a long thread is a pain.
scav
Repost to this thread as I wasn’t attracting enough flak.
Possible suggestions put out for Kicking Around and General Abuse. What about swapping/reordering the the sections in the right hand column? The part I used most is the Recent Posts section so it would be handiest if it was on top. I can understand why the front-pagers names belong up there too, but the contact function is something done less often so for me at least it gets pushed lower down the column. Categories and Archives drop down? Down toward the bottom — certainly less important and frequently used that the recent posts link. I’m agnostic about everything else. Kick away.
kdaug
Perhaps an underline for the posters with links to their pages, rather than a different color?
WaterGirl
@hamletta: I liked it the way it was before the rebuild – basically, the name was left justified and the date/time stamp was right justified. So you could quickly scan for names and you could also quickly scan for times to see if a thread was already dead. (I still had a window open when they changed to the new system, and I haven’t refreshed that window, so I can easily compare the old with the new.)
hamletta
Well, hallelujah, never mind!
The whitespace issue I was having seems to have healed itself while I was writing that comment!
I would maybe bump up the em-size on the title line of comments, the one with the number, name, and datestamp. It would set them apart from the comment itself, since the rule between comments is so faint. But that’s just me.
hamletta
Well, hallelujah, never mind!
The whitespace issue I was having seems to have healed itself while I was writing that comment!
I would maybe bump up the em-size on the title line of comments, the one with the number, name, and datestamp. It would set them apart from the comment itself, since the rule between comments is so faint. But that’s just me.
NotMax
The ‘exorcist green’ color is not only unattractive, but hard to read to boot. If it must be green, a darker shade, please. Maybe something closer to teal.
Also please thicken the divider lines just a bit (maybe 2 px thicker) so they don’t look like an arrayof dots to those of us with more blurry senior vision.
Putting a colored background behind the comment numbers and having the comment numbers be the same background white against the colored background would be humbly suggested to not only set those off but also to liven up the design just a tad.
As Firefox 4 is now supposed to be officially released in February (supposedly ‘final’ test build released this past week), here’s hoping your web guru is checking the design in that version.
Fianlly, maybe an asterisk or bullet or other prtinter’s symbol for the hyperlink to each comment rather than the repetition of the word Link time after time after time as one scrolls down the page.
hamletta
I swear I only clicked “Submit” once. FYWP!
Alison
Whoa, this place is all effed up :(
All the sidebar content is smushed together at the bottom of the page, and the comments are like one big ass run-on post. No space between, although you seem to be aware of that part.
Also, wtf about gravatars? I see nothing of the sort.
worn
I haven’t read through every comment on the two maintenance posts, so for any repetitions I will beg y’all’s forgiveness.
[Technical: currently viewing the site on FF under WinXP. One is an actual XP desktop computer, the other is XP run on MacBook Pro via VMWare. I think for both I’m running FFv5.0 but the ‘About’ pull down supplies a bunch of info that I can’t quite parse.]
1. The font seems a little harder to read. It renders a little thin visually, i.e., there’s a little too much white space within the characters. I wish it had a slightly less wide aspect ratio in the horizontal or slightly thicker vertical elements to visually fatten it up. This issue is much more pronounced on the Mac. Notwithstanding other comments from earlier today, the point size looks A-OK to me.
2. In the comments, the commenters handles would benefit from some method to make them stand out visually. Just going with bold seems overkill. So I dunno, slightly larger size? A demi-bold font within the same family?
3. Related: rendering commenters whose handles point back to their sites in aqua produces a bit of eyestrain, esp. on MacBook LCD.
4. Comments look ‘pushed down’ vertically within their horizontal rules, i.e., it looks as if a blank line that should at the bottom is instead inserted at the top of the comments.
5. Maybe related to #4: I’m sad I didn’t at least get to see the (g)avatars everyone was talking about earlier. Neither computer is displaying them as of 3:08 PST.
6. Ever since the introduction of the “@” convention to reply to previous comments, I’ve thought it would be nice to either have a mouseover* that let you read what is being replied to or some sort of simple way to return to where one was in the comment thread after clicking the “@ username” link.
*I can easily see how a mouseover could be a Kontera-esque annoyance, however. Not sure what the solution is to replies greatly separated from the original comment…
7. The “Reply” link that magically appears at the bottom right of the comment when you mouseover “Link” really should appear in the same general vicinity, like immediately to the right. Interface Design 101.
8. Paragraph indents also wouldn’t hurt.
Otherwise, looks great!
worn
http://www.balloon-juice.com
worn
Oh, yeah:
Please make the Balloon Juice logo & balloon graphic clickable links to BJ’s ‘home’ page. They are big, tempting nothings right now.
SiubhanDuinne
I mentioned this also on Anne Laurie’s open thread, but it’s probably more relevant here.
There used to be a link/tag called “Respond” at the end of each main f/p post. Clicking on it would automatically take you to the Reply Comment box — a useful feature (especially on the BlackBerry where you don’t want to chew up your thumb by having to scroll through dozens, scores, or hundreds of comments in order to post a comment). For some reason, this has been removed! PLEASE restore it, for the love of Tunch, I’m begging you!
TIA.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I think it’s “reply” rather than respond, and it’s still there for me if I just move over to the lower right hand corner of the comment I want to reply to.
I use Safari 5.x on a mac, what browser are you in, or are you on your crackberry?
4jkb4ia
Duly noted.