Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Fight them, without becoming them!

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

You cannot shame the shameless.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Exciting Site Maintenance Plans!

Exciting Site Maintenance Plans!

by | 23 Comments

This post is in: ,

The Road Forward

Folks,

Just a quick update and then open thread.

I just sent out a notice to our group of testers to take one final look at the test site.  The test concludes tomorrow, and I’ll then review and act upon their feedback. The goal is to launch on the live site Tuesday about 9 pm Eastern. The new stuff will all launch in an instant, but I will still need to do a bunch of back-end settings adjustments, so I expect the site will be fully ready by about 10 pm.

The big news that many might not yet know: we are not adding the new comment system; it had too many negatives for our testers. So I tightened up the existing system a bit. We experimented with reply-to-post/reply-to-comment notifications, but it was too quirky and had limited appeal, as it turned out.  We experimented with enhanced text/link/media buttons for comments, but there was too much to work through, so we’re sticking with the existing Bold/Italic/Link buttons.

I’ve re-organized the menu system and sidebar and rebuilt the site from the “stock” theme and plugin files. This gets rid of the “page controls” issue at the bottom of the page. Note – this won’t work until Tuesday night.

Some other highlights: the “back” function has returned to comments, the sidebar ad isn’t getting chopped off, improved fonts – style, size, font, etc. for many things, altered Blogroll and Contact so that iOS users and those blocking popups won’t have issues, and much more.

 

That should (finally!) wrap up this stuff for  me. I know that Mistermix had planned to do some magic to improved performance by combining and editing a number of site files. He had also planned to get our caching and CDN setup running smoothly. So this should make for a lightning-fast site, when he gets a chance to make those enhancements.

I’ll make an announcement Tuesday once the final test concludes to remind folks that there will be some major maintenance in the 9-10 pm Eastern hour.

 

Besides that, Open Thread!

Reader Interactions

23Comments

  3. 3.

    Dennis D. Croskey

    Love the picture. Monument Valley is one of the most starkly beautiful places we’ve ever visited.

  4. 4.

    Prescott Cactus

    Will we still be able to turn the cameras of other commenters on and watch them clandestinely ?

    Please so no !

  6. 6.

    Chyron HR

    We experimented with changing everything for no reason but it turns out the people using the site liked it the way it was.

    If only you could be in charge of product development at Apple.

  8. 8.

    superpredators4hillary

    How about html anchors in user comments instead of that one-directional javascript thing you got going on? The html anchors could also solve the problem of the useless comment link in the OP.

  10. 10.

    superpredators4hillary

    @BR: That’s the road where Anne Laurie and Betty Cracker drive this blog off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.

  12. 12.

    EthylEster

    I just want to mention one thing.
    The blogroll just after the upgrade would always open the selected site in a new window, clobbering the previous blogroll selection. OK, I lived with that.

    But NOW it opens the selected site in the same window as B-J. This seems even less optimal.

    Of course I yearn to return to the original (and most intuitive) behavior: select a site, get a new window, select another site, get another new window. But I can change (if I have to)…as they say in Red Green’s Man Prayer.

    But…thanks Alain et al.

  13. 13.

    BillCinSD

    I am using Firefox 45.0.1 and Windows 10 and get my back button filling up with references to the open page, right now I have 2 Balloon Juice front pages and 5 links to this page (6 now as another one was added while typing, 9 now that I just went to check out Chrome). This does not seem to happen on Chrome, nor on Firefox 45.0.1 and Windows 7.

    eta: The back button is now reading only references to this page

  15. 15.

    Citizen_X

    Can we get the “comments” and “continue reading” links to actually go to the top of comments and the break point in text, respectively, like they used to? Pet peeve of mine. Thanks!

  16. 16.

    Prescott Cactus

    @BR: Monument Valley in Mexican Hat, UT. Was used in Forrest Gump movie when he ran across the country.

  17. 17.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Um, is Tuesday, um primary day, the best day to do this? Especially in the evening as the polls are closing and the results are coming in?

    Why not wait a day and avoid the disaster?

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    @BillCinSD: Alain will know better than me, so he may jump in. But my understanding is that craziness is related to the evil autoplay video automatically refreshing the site.

    I got rid of the awful evil autoplay video by telling AdBlock to block the video ad (you cut & paste the URL for the evil video). I suggest you try that because I am almost certain that will eliminate the issue you described.

  21. 21.

    henqiguai

    D@mmit, Alain, you’re destroying one of the fun things going on here! The ongoing kvetching, p!issing, and moaning about the site was part of the fun! Ah crap; will just have to get along with an improved reading experience. Thanks!

Comments are closed.