There was some kind of a database issue overnight – it appeared to be related to the comment feed, which I disabled.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in politely, with screen shots, showing what was going on with the new layout on smaller monitors. I’ve rolled out a couple of small tweaks to the layout that people were kind enough to test over the weekend.
By the way, when I’m fixing the site after getting in late from a trip and having a bunch of paying work waiting for me, there’s nothing better than reading comments that start like this:
Golly, what a complete and umitigated unreadable piece of shit this blog format changed to.
I understand that some of you have small monitors, so I was trying to remember the last time I used a monitor on a PC that had a horizontal resolution of 1024 or less, which is where the problem is happening. I think it was prior to the year 2000 – over 13 years ago. In other words, children have reached puberty since the last time I used a monitor that small. We’re going to try to help you guys out, but please cut the fucking attitude about our attempt to design a site that works better on the new, wider displays. If you have a problem, I’m happy to look at screenshots that you send in, or descriptions of what’s going wrong.
And, yes, I realize that iPad users are not happy with the current site layout, and don’t want to use the mobile layout. I’m going to make some changes to the mobile layout, but in the meantime, turn your iPad on its side and use the non-mobile site.
The Red Pen
Golly, what a complete and umitigated unreadable piece of shit this blog format changed to. Some of us still use Netscape Navigator 4.0, assmunch.
On a CGA monitor.
Over dial-up.
And demons poke us with pitchforks and pour molten sulfur on us.
@aol.com
NotMax
Hm.
Something is not right with the site code all of a sudden.
Very, very fast look-see is that
a bracket is missing at the end of this:
div
id=”nmWidgetContainer” class=”nmWidgetContainer” data-client=”218″
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Hey mistermix,
As I just mentioned in the Apple thread, thanks very much for whatever you did to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar. It’s greatly appreciated.
Don’t let the grumbling get to you. Cole seems to encourage it. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
Fuck all those whiny bitches.
Nicole
You’re doing a great job. Thanks for mentioning the iPad thing- I’m glad it’s on the radar, even if it takes awhile to get fixed. No worries. Worst case scenario is I don’t get to read BJ for a day, and I think I will live. There are disappointments and there are tragedies and most of the time I know the difference.
c u n d gulag
Jayzoos H. Keerist on a Commadore, I don’t envy you for doing this.
Punchy
Thick skin mrmix does not appear to possess. Shouldn’t that be in the job descripy?
Todd
That’s what I’ve been doing.
No biggie.
Poopyman
As someone who married an Oracle DBA, I can say this is about as accurate a problem description as one can give. Seems there’s as much witchcraft involved in DBs as there is engineering.
scuffletuffle
Too calm and reasonable…no sweary bits. I, for one, am extremely disappointed.
C’mon, Mistermix, channel your inner Cole.
raven
Damn, they just totally changed flickr!
Biff Longbotham
Since 2004 I’ve been getting what I pay for here at BJ. ;-) Everybody concerned: keep up the good work.
Stella B.
There is a button at the bottom that allows one to turn off the mobile site and just use the regular site for the iPad. It would be lovely if this setting was stored as a cookie so that it did not have to be reset when returning to BJ (which one does oh so frequently). Otherwise, the redesign is nice. The mobile site does not work well for those of us with aging eyes, but this is a minor problem since the mobile site can be made to go away.
Liquid
Morning Joe pulling an AC360. I must say, as a male fifteen years her junior, Mika is looking especially fine in her ‘jeans that cost more than a month of foodstamps.’
Yeah, sleep can take a backseat to vodka and the jockeying for some sort of breathless award. I do believe my cynicism is beginning to consume me.
In other news Tom Coburn is shoring up his cockpony credentials.
Todd
@The Red Pen:
Reminisce and enjoy. Think Compuserve. Prodigy. AOL.
youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0&sns=em
NotMax
Open Thread?
Now there’s an oddball headline to smile at.
Germany nationalises Bieber monkey
dm
Using the mobile site on an ipod touch, when Anne Laurie embeds videos, usually it turns here post into a dark rectangle that obscures the text. It’s like the video bounding box expands to cover the whole post.
Thanks.
Chyron HR
God, you are just a reprehensible fuck. Every fucking IT joke is based on you.
Baud
Thanks, mistermix. I”ve been relying on the comment feed after Recent Comments went away, so I hope that can be fixed.
Nicole
@dm:
Same thing on the iPad. Turning the iPad didn’t fix the problem. For what it’s worth.
piratedan
currently using ie10 to access the site instead of my beloved firefox, which still places the column that contains ads and the newsmax links in the left/middle of the blog text on the non-mobile site. Don’t know if I simply have to dump greasemonkkey or stylish or if FF is simply borked (although I have rebooted, reinstalled FF and updated it to no avail). Since I can access via another browser it’s not a big deal, just happy to have a blog to access tyvm but for other folks, it might be an enormous issue.
Nicole
Turned on Morning Joe. Sweet lord, has someone told Mika she has a severe case of jaundice? Put a pageboy wig on her and she’d look like He-Man (the 1980s version)
Liquid
@Nicole: Like I said, I knew she was statuesque* but daaamn, she needs to rock the jeans more! Oh and slap the piss out of Joe when he starts running his mouth.
*ok the term implies being tall but her height is…how tall is she? she can’t be more than 5’8″-5’10″…
PurpleGirl
@piratedan: I’m using FF and have no problems with the layout: three columns, nice crisp borders, etc.
What I am having a problem with is refreshing a page; it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I have to go to another site, pick a link to BJ and then when I go to BJ I have the new posts. That is becoming maddening.
mistermix
@Nicole: Can you post here in the comments or send me a link to the post where this happens? I know she did that once and I fixed it, didn’t know it was a regular pattern.
@piratedan: My firefox looks fine – could it be that someone’s effort to disable the NewsMax plugin in Stylish or whatever isn’t implemented right?
Cassidy
I hate the new site. ;)
Betty Cracker
Thank you for taking on this thankless task!
mistermix
@PurpleGirl: Mac or PC?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Todd:
I think of QuantumLink every time I have to go into the Metro interface.
max
@piratedan: Don’t know if I simply have to dump greasemonkkey or stylish or if FF is simply borked (although I have rebooted, reinstalled FF and updated it to no avail).
My money would be on
greasemonkeyno, stylish. I don’t run either with FF 21 and I don’t have any issues.Unless I resize the browser to 600×800. Then it’s fairly annoying but still readable.
In other tragic news, it looks to me like Fort Smith is square in the sights of whatever exciting tornadic events we get today. (Unisys wind energy map, which is more intense than yesterday.
max
[‘The 2-6 pm Central is the usual windows for tornadoes, but 3pm Central is the witching hour, so if we have more excitement today, that’ll be when it arrives.’]
gogol's wife
As I’ve said before, my only complaint is that the new site is so much more readable that I spend way too much time here now.
MikeJ
@mistermix: It also looks fine on firefox for me. One thing I’ve noticed that’s weird is if you shrink the width it looks flakey but if you keep going and make it even narrower it pops out and looks fine again.
gogol's wife
OT, but I’m not seeing any updates on Soonergrunt. Has anyone heard from him?
Suffern ACE
@gogol’s wife: so what you’re saying is that you’d prefer regular outages so that you can spend quality time with your family.
cbear
@Nicole:
I think I see where it all started going bad for you.
Shakezula
A recipe for the obstreperous.
Ingredients.
1 Public restroom stall.
1 Permanent marker.
1 Obstreperous person’s email address.
Use marker to apply the words “Spank me hard,” followed by email address, to the wall of the bathroom stall.
Repeat until desire for justice has been satisfied or guilt kicks in.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@gogol’s wife: Someone last night said he’d posted to FB that he was OK but hadn’t heard from some of his family.
rikyrah
just wondering if anyone’s heard from sooner?
daryljfontaine
The small font in the mobile/iPad site doesn’t bother me, but there are a few functional issues: no permalink to comments (something I used to “bookmark” my place so when I left Safari to go do something else and came back, the reloading page would jump to where I left off — now it reloads to the top of the comments, which is annoying), no comment numbers (exacerbates the previous issue), and no link previews on click-and-hold (so I could avoid clicking on potentially loud YouTube videos at work).
D
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Took too long to find the direct link to the comment about sooner and FB.
Keith G
Watching this place unravel last night was an experience. I really appreciate MM’s effort. Tell Dougj that he should not write any more nasty comments to mister mix.
Any word from Soonergrunt?
Schlemizel
@The Red Pen:
I so wish there was a ‘like’ button just for comments like this.
I’ll bet you a dime 99% of the people who post shit like was said last night would not speak that way to Mix if they were in a room together or even over the phone – WTF is it about the intertubes that makes people believe that sort of shit is OK in comments?
Kristine
Thank you for all the work you did. I like the new layout.
Keith G
Watching this place unravel last night was an experience. I really appreciate MM’s effort. Tell Dougj that he should not write any more nasty comments to mister mix.
Any word from Soonergrunt?
Sayne
I think it looks great, well done.
However, I did notice that when I view my browser as half of my screen and, say, a spreadsheet as the other, the text of the site is an impossibly narrow column. I have a crappy 1440×900 res on my work monitor (can’t go any higher).
It looks fantastic otherwise.
Schlemizel
BTW – I just noticed that links to previous/next post has been added at the bottom of comments – THANKS! that was a petty annoyance and I appreciate that it is gone now.
Liquid
Soonergrunt checked in yesterday. I can’t say if he was unscathed but he (IIRC) was on his mobile – i.e. his is alive.
Wag
@dm:
Seconded. All the other front pagers embed video without issues. AL does something differs that borks her posts on iPhone and I touch.
And AL’s video issues have been going in for months, predating the redesign by a considerable margin.
Keith G
I doubled because the mobile site told me it would not accept my comment and to repost….I did.
Skippy-san
There still seems to be an issue with comments-especially if you have a blog to link to. The site seems to be eating them-not even a “waiting moderation” comment appears up.
am
The blog looks like crap in lynx. And the new layout is causing burn-in on my old monochromes phosphors. Did you even test this?
gogol's wife
@gogol’s wife:
Yes, thanks, I saw that. I guess I was wondering about any more direct communication.
gogol's wife
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
My comment #52 was supposed to be addressed to you.
raven
@Liquid: That was before the tornado.
Joey Maloney
Well, sure, but that has to do with content, not layout.
MikeJ
@am: Actually I tried it in both lynx and links and it looked fine.
i.imgur.com/Jp66lfR.jpg
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Skippy-san:
Does this link work?
Rosalita
Fuck the haters MM, it’s their own problem that they can’t figure out that not everything is about them. You can’t please everyone.
Nicole
@mistermix: It may not be a regular pattern; I haven’t been reading BJ on my iPad the past few days because of that weird formatting thing over the weekend- I assumed it would get fixed eventually and so I forgot about it. It may likely be fine by now; I’ll check the site out on my iPad once the battery recharges.
Nicole
@cbear:
Heh. True story- I turned on MJ a few weeks ago (I don’t watch it often, but if the TV goes on at all before 9, that’s probably what I’ll put on), and my toddler objected strenuously, wanting instead to watch “Wreck It Ralph.” I finally gave in, and as I picked up the remote to switch to DVD, he patted me on the knee and said gently, “But I like Rachel Maddow.”
Corbin Dallas Multipass
just for the record, some use a large monitor but just split it in half.
thanks for recognizing the issue.
mistermix
@Corbin Dallas Multipass: The new layout looks OK on 1/2 of my monitor. I agree that the middle content is narrow, but it is readable.
Amir Khalid
The site layout is just about perfect now, thanks to all the work you’ve put in. I can’t think of anything that’s lacking. It runs just fine except when Tunch has eated the hamsters, like he did earlier today.
Bobby Thomson
@Chyron HR: lighten up, Francis.
Bobby Thomson
@Chyron HR: lighten up, Francis.
RSA
TechCrunch has it that the current most popular screen resolution is 1366 x 768, as of 2012. In 2012, 1024 x 768 accounted for 20% of the data.
That said, it’s worth thinking about usage patterns. Not everyone uses all of their screen real estate for open browser windows, and some olds (like me) need to zoom in to make the text big enough to be readable. I know that the canonical BJ attitude is “Fuck you ungrateful bastards,” but just in case…
Uncle Cosmo
Mmix, you might want to keep in mind that you are dealing with people who for their entire lifetimes have had NEW! IMPROVED! products shoved at them & inevitably found that the only part that was IMPROVED was the producer’s profit. Corpitalism breeds cynicism.
Not that anyone really cares what an uninvited poster thinks, but FTR the only real change I see on the site is the shrinkage of the content column to less than half the width of my 1024×768 screen in order to accommodate ad columns (which are mostly blank once one scrolls down past comment #3 or so). I cannot identify a single way in which this site is working any better or faster now than before. (Which makes it feel an awful lot like one of them thar NEW! IMPROVED! thingies previously cited, except the bottom line probably hasn’t profited from the change…)
(WinXP/FF20/1024×768 screen)
llelldorin
@RSA: This. My monitor is immense, but I tend to panel it with relatively small windows. Thanks for the fix!
Mike in NC
On my very first day in the Navy I learned the expression “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
jcricket
I demand a refund!
Maude
Looks good. Thx.
am
@MikeJ:
Must be my build, I’ll see if I can pull a patch from upstream and rebuild on my PDP-11.
(KIDDING. Though, props for browser compatibility testing on lynx _and_ links. At first I was going to joke about it not rendering correctly in IE6, but I’m not a monster)
Mnemosyne
@mistermix:
I’m having a new issue with Safari (fun!). The text is a bit too small with the redesign so I was zooming it up a bit using cmd-+. Prior to the database crash, it would increase all of the columns equally, but now it shrinks the middle column to about half its size and increases the width of the left and right columns. I fiddled around with Preferences but couldn’t find anything that would mitigate the problem. Halp!
Suzanne
MM, I know you’ve been working hard, and there’s more to do, but thanks for the time/effort.
(FTR, I’m one of the complainers, because the full site looks ass-tacular on my iPad and the iPad site has functionality issues.)
Paul Harrington
“Golly, what a complete and umitigated unreadable piece of shit this blog format changed to.”
Hmmm. A hit job, yes, but it has that John Cole je ne sais quois that keeps me coming back for more. It should live at the top right of your home page.
Sly
This site looks like dogshit on my Philco Computerized Communications Console.
am
The kerning on the new font is terrible. Just unreadable. You should replace everything with Akzidenz Grotesk, Stempel Schneidler, or Mary V. Appenzeller Tripelbock Sans Serif.
Ron E.
I’m using a monitor set at 1024. But there isn’t a problem with my monitor or its resolution. The problem is with your site design where the actual content of the site literally (not in the Biden sense) uses about 1/3 of the screen width. The stuff on the left hand column is of no value to me. How about just ditching it or adding it at the bottom of the right hand column (or vice versa)?
Maude
@Ron E.:
How about visiting another blog.
Calming Influence
Oh mistermix, don’t get me started. Shit, I will kill the motherfucker who complains about this site!
piratedan
ty guys will unload the Stylish and see if that helps, appreciate the tips
JR in WV
@Poopyman:
Yes, anything that gets sufficiently complex starts to look like there’s a witchdoctor involved in the day-to-day management. I once spent a day sitting with an Oracle (see, there’s magix in the name, even!) DBA on the phone to support, and the dicsussion was full of magically undefined terms.
am
Also, I have 15 different Firefox plugins and I’m running with 20 different GreaseMonkey scripts, and I blame the site changes on your site for all the problems I’m having with the whole rest of the internet.
(This has been cathartic. Can you tell I work with software? Thanks, I’ll stop now)
The Red Pen
@Schlemizel:
You’re right. The other 1% are Gentoo users who are always prepare to explain exactly how much of a dumbass you are for not catering to Midori. They will be a total dick without regard to social context.
The Red Pen
@Ron E.:
I read Free Republic pretty frequently, and its comments expand to fit the screen width. This can actually make them a little difficult to read. Sometimes my eyes lose track of the line when I go from the end of a line to the start of the next. A shorter line-length prevents that.
JR in WV
@JR in WV:
Also, thanks for the update, looking good.
A small suggestion, could the comment box be a little bigger? or perhaps dynamically grow to always be a line or two bigger than the current comment?
Hang in there, mrmix!
artem1s
@Ron E.:
gotta agree with the comments on the useless side columns issues. don’t see why the width on those overrides the minimum set width on the actual content. Why not have the middle column be a standard set width with the side columns varying as the user chooses the overall width of the browser.
I’m using all the latest and greatest software and hardware with a 21 inch screen but work with multiple apps open all the time. None of them at the full width of my screen. BJ is the only website that has this weirdly adjusting column issue. It’s making the site incredibly hard to read. Forget zooming the text to a larger size. then you get a ribbon sized column about 3 words wide. I can’t imagine what it looks like on an 13 in screen (pretty standard for laptops now)
not user friendly in terms of adjusting the center column view. only viewable if you stretch out to occupy 2/3 or more of screen size.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Mnemosyne: As others have pointed out earlier (thanks!), in Firefox you can now scale the text independent of scaling the other things if you want.
View => Zoom => Check “Zoom Text Only”
Then Ctrl-+ will only increase the text size (leaving the column widths the same). And with mistermix’s recent changes, you don’t get the horizontal scroll bar any more either.
I dunno if Safari (or Chrome) have similar settings.
HTH a little.
Cheers,
Scott.
Scout211
Always use the iPad in landscape. So no problems there.
Big screen at work, so no problems there.
So no problems.
Thanks to the designer and Mistermix.
PurpleGirl
@mistermix: PC (netbook), Win XP. TY.
marleedog
d-lurking to say that I like the new site, but if I could find a “home” button somewhere near the top I would like ti better.
Vista/Firefox
/delurking
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Just to finish the thought:
Addon page for Chrome to Zoom Text Only.
How to Zoom Text Only on Safari 5.1.
HTH someone else out there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Calming Influence
@marleedog: You get back “Home” by clicking on the “Balloon Juice” logo with the big blue balloon in it. ;-)
Jordan
Just to reiterate what some people have said, running at high zoom levels shrinks the actual blog space to a very small percentage of screen width (25% or so). Chrome, AFAIK, doesn’t have an ability to ‘zoom text only’. And I’m not using on an old-fashioned monitor — I’m using a chromebook pixel.
sal
Thanks for checking on fixes to the iPad layout. That will be much appreciated. I kind of liked the blue serif font for post titles that was up for a few days, but whatever. The content font isn’t my favorite either (maybe it’s my older eyes, seems kind of stick-like and not flowing, a little hard to read), but hey, I’m not the one volunteer working on it, and everyone else can be glad for that. Thanks again.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
Do you have View | Zoom Text Only set on?
300baud
I do have a wider monitor, but it’s so I can have multiple things up at once. I think it’s presumptuous of a site to grab as many pixels as they can. At my preferred window width, the current Balloon Juice design has a little stripe 5 words wide running down the middle.
Maybe you could let the various sidebars drift on top and bottom when the window width is narrow, rather than letting them dominate the main content?
Steeplejack
@artem1s:
You don’t say what browser/OS you are using, but this is a “tell” that you probably don’t have View | Zoom | Zoom Text Only selected.
Steeplejack
@marleedog:
You can click on the Balloon Juice logo to go to the home page.
low-tech cyclist
Please don’t consider this a complaint, because I like the new site design, even with the sidescroll. But:
At home, I have a flat panel monitor like everyone else does now, but we didn’t get our first one until ~2006, so the one I use is no older than that. But it works just fine; unlike the old CRT monitors, the flat panels seem to last forever. And why throw out a perfectly good monitor?
So IMHO, you should take it as a given that people will be using old monitors.
Steeplejack
@Jordan:
“Zoom text only” extension for Chrome. Page also has links to other zoom extensions.
Mnemosyne
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Found it! The menu is in a slightly different place on Safari 6.0, but I was able to use your link to search for the 6.0 version of the solution.
Ex Regis
@Mistermix
The desktop version on my iPad is quite an improvement over the old site design, easy to read and scroll when I expand the middle panel. My only request is that the button to select the desktop version be put at the top of the page instead of the bottom. That’s assuming you don’t want to bother with a cookie for now.
Thanks for all your work.
Gloom Raider
Delurking to ask if anything funky is going on with the RSS feed now: I use a Netvibes page, and the last update for the BJ feed as of now (3:08 EDT) is the Apple post from last night. I can use the links at the top of the posts to get around fine, but thought I’d mention that something relatively minor might be up.
And I appreciate you guys. I can just never be bothered to comment and say so. ;)
Vlad
That’s not an option for iPhone users. Please give us an option to disable the mobile version of the site so that I don’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and manually deactivate it each and every time I visit the site, because like all mobile sites it’s a horrible experience for the reader.
JD Rhoades
I like most of the design changes, and can report they seem to be working fine on Firefox. My only very tiny gripe is: why are “Newsmax headlines” above “recent posts”? In fact, why is that right wing fount of misinformation on the blog at all?
But it’s not a deal-breaker or anything. It’s just that I really really REALLY hate Newsmax. It’s what wingnut assholes invariably link to to “prove” the latest scandal.
mistermix
@Gloom Raider: Thanks for reporting that, I just fixed it.
phil
Can anyone tell me what the big empty box is that shows up at the end of the first post on a page?
I tried turning off the NoScript and whitelisting the site on Ghostery, but the box remained empty. I was expecting an ad to be there. Quickly turned NoScript & Ghostery back on when I saw the quantity of 3rd parties that have their fingers all over this website.
Pete Mack
It works great on mobile phones–all content, no ads at all. Much better than old version. And text size is good since there’s no zoom.