Folks,
The theme update could have gone better, and is not done. On the “glass is half-full” side, it could have gone much worse.
To avoid such unpleasantness when the theme is updated in the future, I’m setting up a child theme, to which I can make most of my tweaks and then not have them undone when a new update overwrites all the theme files.
The main problem is that the child theme is only taking some of the main/parent theme’s settings, and so we get green color scheme and fonts (even though the setting says blue, black text, etc.) and we get weird footer and sidebar functions. I have a support request in and am awaiting help; I suspect that like I often do, I’ve found a bug and so they will need to fix it and release a new theme version. This is why it was green for a few hours yesterday as I hoped the support person would log in and see the issue and help fix it. Instead, he sent me a link to instructions that weren’t helpful – it’s their function(s) that is not working correctly. It will likely “go green” again today for a while.
Many changes are thus awaiting their help as I am stuck using the Parent theme until this gets resolved. I am making some changes to it, but if I have to load a new theme update to fix this partial-settings issue, then I will need to re-do that work. So I am trying to get things done while not investing too much time on things that will get overwritten in the new theme update.
Ads, site/page title, and the meta text below a post title are done. Many font, styling, etc. issues should also be resolved. I also figured out how to get the title thing going without having to use Yoast SEO plugin (the theme developer’s suggestion), so there should be a huge drop-off in comments being flagged for moderation. That alone should make everyone much happier, especially those who post lots of posts with links in them.
Next up is fixing the text below the post, right above the comments, and then I’ll add in comment number. Hopefully by then, I will have gotten support on the child/parent issue!
But first, I have some important errands/appointment to do, so I am posting this in hope that it explains enough that I can go, do my stuff, get back, have some food, and then get back to work without too much grumbling.
Thank you for your patience, I’ll check this post’s comments first when I return.
Paul in KY
Once again, Alain: Appreciate all your hard work on this!
p.a.
Waaaahhhh. Wah. Wah. Wah. etc. (Just prepping you)
gvg
Hmm. I have Christmas shopping still to get done and was planning to click through to Amazon on here maybe tonight. Will any of these changes keep John from getting the reward? I don’t even pretend to understand child and parent or themes. I just want to know if I should do something or not at a certain time.
thanks
Alain the site fixer
@Paul in KY: Thanks Paul! And thanks to all who have offered words of encouragement, suggestions, have identified issues, offered suggested approaches, etc.
Alain the site fixer
@gvg: Nope, Amazon clicking works fine (nothing changed there).
Really, we’re just talking visual and layout issues – color, fonts, etc. Right now, the site should work like normal and thus John should get your $.
Ahasuerus
Note to The Other Chuck – thanks for the reply on the previous maintenance thread. I’ll await your update following site stability.
Alain the site fixer
Okay, stepping away from the keyboard now. See y’all in a couple of hours.
OzarkHillbilly
And my broken ankle is all your fault too! So there!
Matt McIrvin
Where did the green go? The green was my favorite!!!!
elmo
My two biggest issues:
1. Narrow comments on the iPhone 6. Three or four words to a line makes comments hard to read, and FSM forbid the comment include a blockquote because those are indented even further. Every comment starts to look like one of the old pie fights over at GOS, where they’re indented all the way to the right and you have to read vertically.
2. The link to “Comments” at the bottom of posts disappeared again, and it’s annoying as hell to have to scroll back up to the top of a post after reading it in order to get to the comments. Often I don’t bother.
I’m only mentioning these because when Alain says “theme” and “fonts” and so forth are going to be fixed, I can’t tell if these issues are included in that or not.
The Other Chuck
@Ahasuerus: I’ve updated Troll-B-Gone for today’s moving target, so go ahead and update.
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: What’s the latest on ease-of-reading, eye relief etc? I always found a buff background and blue-black letters nice. Remember resumé advice? Bright white with black print, unless the job is art related, advertising etc then variation ok:
amk
“… the meta text below a post title are done.”
Good job. Just till the last thread, they were all muddled up with the author name tucked way behind the meta data.
May be you could also get rid of the redundancy of Home Page button since you already have home page and BJ icon to get you there?
scav
@Matt McIrvin: it’s been taken away as the other half of the war on Christmas. First they came for the red coffee cups, then ….
steverinoCT
On Firefox (and Safari) on Mac OS10.11.1, and Firefox on Win10, all the latest updates, the /page/2/ etc. URLs aren’t working– I can’t go back further than the front page.
Going post-to-post using the side-arrows, same thing: it will go only so far, and then recycle to the top post. I missed a few days and now can’t get back to them.
I am running adblock, but not with Safari, which has the same issues.
cleek
and… there’s a pie filter (now v6.0.0) which is working with BJ as it stands now.
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?page_id=19041
sounds like it’ll be broken soon, tho
Scapegoat
Alain: you’re likely aware of Discourse.org, but if not, it’s become my favorite (to use) commenting system for a number of reasons.
The FYWP system seems a perpetual PITA and if you tire of it, Discourse might be a solution?
I’d post a link but… FYWP
Bobby Thomson
Child theme? Needs more dinosaurs.
Paul in KY
@cleek: Just read about your house woes. Man, that sucks. Hope you & wife get it fixed soon.
Steeplejack (phone)
@steverinoCT:
You can get to previous days by putting in the date as a URL, e.g.,
www.balloon-juice.com/2015/12/09/. That will bring up all the entries for that day.SFAW
The child is father to the theme?
Thanks for all your hard work!
Lee
Thanks for the hard work on this. It has really come a long way since the initial rollout.
cleek
@Paul in KY:
thanks.
it’s an unbelievable nightmare.
Scout211
Page does not enlarge using iPad.
I am not sure in which category this function belongs–to tell you now or tell you later (after complete upgrade). But this function is one that is needed for all of us using tablets so I will mention it now.
I posted another issue in an older site maintenance thread–the archive pages do not work. If you click on an archive page you get the current front page.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Scout211:
(Hopefully) temporary workaround here for archive pages.
Scout211
@Steeplejack (phone):
Thanks! Will try that.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@cleek: I cannot even imagine an nightmare of those proportions. My best thoughts for you (since that’s all I got).
WereBear
@p.a.: And if you are applying for the Republican Presidential Nomination, use Comic Sans.
gogol's wife
@Paul in KY:
what happened to cleek’s house?
steverinoCT
@Steeplejack (phone): Danke.
WereBear
@cleek: I so appreciate it, and yes, that house situation sucks.
cleek
@gogol’s wife:
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?cat=24
short version: wife and i are building a house. when the house was about 1/3 of the way done, we learned that the builder has been misappropriating the funds and has taken 2/3 of our construction loan but only built 1/3 of the house. then he went bankrupt. and because he didn’t pay the majority of the sub contractors who did the work, so they’ve placed liens on the property. and those liens are stopping us from finishing the house, which has been sitting – wide open to the world – since July, and which we really can’t afford to finish now, but we have to since a third of a house can’t be sold.
he did this to multiple people. so there are civil suits, possible criminal charges, and lots of legal fees.
cleek
FU moderation
WereBear
@cleek: Just a thought: can you pick something under the Small Claims Court financial limits, enough to get them to court and lift that last lien?
Just thinking of it because of the usual quick turnaround time.
Keith G
My biggest issue is that this site has not given me a white pony that pees champagne. And fuck you Alain, I want that god damn pony.
hells littlest angel
Well I say, happy St Patrick’s Day!
The Other Chuck
@Scapegoat: Cole has stated in no uncertain terms that third-party comment hosting is a complete non-starter. And I have to agree with him: aside from the privacy issues (his main concern), if the host goes out of business, decides to start charging for the service, or gets bought up by a company that does, then poof, there goes your entire comment archive.
mclaren
Hey, Alain…anybody planning on doing anything about the way text is now crammed into 1/3 of the computer screen in the center, while leaving huge amounts of worthless empty space to the right and the left?
You can call that a “theme” if you want. I call it “borderline unreadable.”
J R in WV
Regarding access to older pages, like most computer tools, there are always more than one way of doing things. At the bottom of the front page, there are page numbers on the left, as in 1, 2, 3, >, >>
I’m guessing that the single right arrow will take you to page 4, and the double right arrow will take you to page 2986… the very first B-J page, back when Mr Cole was , er, Republican. Gives me shudders just to type those words!
Someone else already suggested using an embedded date in an URL to access pages on that date, so that’s a third way to get to older pages.
*****************************
Alain, thanks for the work you are doing.
I hope it doesn’t interfere with a steady income stream from other clients! My pet missing function is being able to use the back button when I follow a trail of comment/replies; without even comment numbers it can be hard to find you way back to where you started on a 300 comment posting.
Good luck and keep up the good owwlke. er, work.
J R in WV
@cleek:
That’s terrible!! Perhaps you could get some friends and wrap the nearly house with Typar house wrap to keep the snow, sleet and rain out of the partial structure? My neighbors built their own house, and lived with Typar housewrap stapled all around the house for several years. They also make a special tape to get the ‘wrap worked around window and door openings. Of course if there aren’t windows and doors coming right away for those openings, just wrap right over them.
This happened to a co-worker of mine years ago, I never heard how it was resolved. Their builder had used their loan monies to pay off costs on the previous house he built, and they were hoping that he would finally make enough money somewhere to pay off the mechanic’s liens on their house. Or perhaps steal money from his next client to fix his last client, although as good people I’m sure they didn’t think that thought out loud in their brains.
Much mental suffering for sure. Fraud and theft, sounds like to me. Hoping you have a lawyer who is reasonable!
Good luck!!
max
To avoid such unpleasantness when the theme is updated in the future, I’m setting up a child theme, to which I can make most of my tweaks and then not have them undone when a new update overwrites all the theme files.
You could cp the parent theme to
a new versiontwo versions, patch the changes from the child theme into one version and then cp it over the parent. (As in, you could script this, so when the parent theme gets overwritten, you can diff the new parent against a pristine version, and then apply those diffs to the modified parent theme copy and then cp that over the updated parent theme.)Yeah, that’s a hack, but it should work until WordPress does whatever WordPress is doing.
BTW, no functional redirect/page load from the https://balloon-juice.com/ link.
max
[‘Black Flag – Rise Above.’]
Alain the site fixer
Ok, a small update:
1) SSL isn’t there yet. That’s after this theme nightmare eases!
2) Back button/ functionality for comments will return, not a big focus since we’re uprooting the comment system in 2-3 weeks. It shall return, I’ve heard all the plaintive cries from the darkness.
3) Font size, color, etc. will be further tweaked. I’m not a fan of some of the settings I’ve been re-applying so after the more-important stuff is done, I’ll tackle that stuff.
4) Site not zooming on phones, etc. – thanks, I’ll get that done soon.
5) site width, etc. will be fixed. Again, we’re frozen while I await support on the theme issue so I’m not working on this at the moment as I await help.
The site may “go green” again as support looks at the issue I’ve reported. Their help yesterday was underwhelming – pointing me to instructions that didn’t help, and then no response to my multiple requests for more help. 24 hours later, I posted a new support ticket and hope they will pay more attention to it, and that means enabling the child site. I’ll keep an eye on things so when they’re done, I can set it back to the glorious style you see now.
And for page links, archives, etc. – no idea what’s going on. Truly, that is not a top concern, but it’s on the list. RSS is also on the fritz and this may be related…
Ahasuerus
@The Other Chuck:
I just pulled your update down from greasyfork. Thanks!
Al Swearengen
Don’t sweat it, Alain, no one is going to stop reading the site over it.
smedley the uncertain
@J R in WV: I miss it too…
Back button takes me to previous web site, totally outside of BJ, rather than back to comment I was reading when I jumped to read the older comment. I’m kinda not following threads any more because it’s a PITA, Comment numbering would help.
Cheers to Alain tho for the work he’s done so far.
smedley the uncertain
@Alain the site fixer: Hang in there. Site still useful and interesting as always
psychobroad
Hi Alain, don’t know if you’re still checking here, but I can’t turn the page to get to older posts–I’m not able to read Balloon Juice every day & when I can I like to catch up. I’m up to page 4 and it just keeps reloading the front page. Thanks, psychobroad
Amir Khalid
Amir Khalid
I think that n the comments, you need a bit more space between the bottom line of text and the “Reply” prompt. One line should do it.
Justinb
I want my mobile theme back :(
NotMax
Front page getting security alert in Firefox.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.hmdnsgroup.com, hmdnsgroup.com
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)
WereBear
Likewise in Chrome: Unsafe certificate warning.
Amir Khalid
You should reconsider the category name “Insurance Below”. It doesn’t make sense.
Alain the site fixer
@Amir Khalid: It’s what Richard chose. Please, advise him on a better one, I’m, like my paternal heritage (Swiss), neutral.
Thanks for pointing out the post comment button, I saw that late and forgot to write it down. I didn’t do it intentionally but clearly something had an unintended side-effect. And thanks for the extra line suggestion, I’ll get to that too.