Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

This blog will pay for itself.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Books are my comfort food!

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republicans do not trust women.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Republicans in disarray!

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

You are here: Home / z-Retired Categories / Previous Site Maintenance / Site Updates Coming Later This Week

Site Updates Coming Later This Week

by | 42 Comments

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Folks,

I’ll be updating the site, plugins, and tweaking a few settings later this week.  After last night’s SSL certificate issue, I’ve dusted off the test server and will soon be hard at work.

I’ve not been around much the post couple of months, so consider me out of the loop. Are there any issues, tweaks, suggestions, etc. I need to hear before I begin work? I’m not planning on changing much styling but with the theme update, there might be some slight appearance changes here and there.  So since I’ll be digging into all kinds of stuff, I just wanted to get your suggestions/peeves so I can see what can be done.

Besides the main updates, I’m planning a special area for National Security posts by Adam and his associates, and also hope to get a good recipe plugin going to snazz up that aspect of things a bit.  And snazz in this case means order and standardized layout, not fancy gimmicks!

I’ll be in and out of this site today and will make another one this evening to get the night crew’s feedback. I will definitely refer to both before I get too deep into the mud.

As always, I’m prepared for lots of grousing, but let’s focus on trying to make things better! If you have specific lines of CSS or what have you that you’d like me to  alter, please let me know the specifics and I’ll see what I can do.  The less analysis and thinking I need to do to tweak it and make you happy the better – it will ensure your change gets done! :)

 

 

 

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  1. 1.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I don’t know why this happens (Firefox on Win10) but every second or third refresh the format of the page changes. To something bizarre.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    Any news from you regarding site updates tends to fill me with dread make me tingle with anticipation. Never a dull moment, and all that …

    I just hope there won’t be any autoplaying video that I have to manually remove myself. I really really hate that.

  3. 3.

    gvg

    It might be nice for john if the amazon shopping while supporting balloon juice link was on the mobile site, not just the regular one.

  4. 4.

    Citizen_X

    How about fixing the “read more” links from the front page so they go to the actual break in the article, instead of to the top of the article page?

  5. 5.

    shomi

    Yea I have a suggestion. Fix the damn links. Go to any post with a linked image or whatever. Click anywhere on either side of your screen and the god damned link will still activate irrespective of text boundaries.

    It’s been like that for years and seems it has never occurred to anyone that something is wrong.

    Update: just tried and it doesn’t seem to do it anymore. Miracle, finally fixed, or just dumb luck you accidentally fixed it while doing something else?

  7. 7.

    piratedan

    perhaps incorporate a version of cleek’s pie filter to be used across all browser platforms. I don’t want to limit anyone’s capacity for free speech, just would prefer to be able to bypass the bullshit, tyvm.

  8. 8.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    I think if you address as much as you can in the Site Maintenance category, many of us will be happy.

    In case it hasn’t been officially mentioned, some of us aren’t able to edit our comments without them being thrown into moderation. In my case, it doesn’t seem to matter if I’m Replying to someone else, or if I’m adding an anchored HTML link, or anything else. Maybe it’s related to the apostrophe in my handle? But I used to be able to edit (at least part of the time…). It would be great if you could fix that, somehow.

    A working Preview function and a bullet-proof editor (posts by regulars should never (IMO) just “disappear” or be thrown in moderation for no sensible reason) would greatly reduce my frustration level in trying to contribute here.

    Thanks for your efforts!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  10. 10.

    Starfish

    Change is scary.

    You know those social media icons on the bottom of every post? On mobile,
    each
    square
    is
    on
    a
    separate
    line.

    And that creates unnecessary scrolling.

  12. 12.

    ShadeTail

    What Citizen_X said. Some people claim the “Read more” links work for them, but they’ve not been working for me ever since the redesign. Which is odd because the “Comments” links at the top and bottom of an article do work. You’d think that if the links to jump right to the comments work, the “Read more” links ought to work also.

  13. 13.

    The Other Chuck

    I suggest paying special attention to what shomi hates and serving that version of the site to him.

  14. 14.

    lowercase steve

    What do you mean by special area for national security posts? If you are doing this, you may also want to create a special area for Richard Mayhew’s healthcare and health insurance industry posts as well.

  15. 15.

    Mike E

    How about a ‘back to top’ button at the end of the comments for us device users (since thread nav buttons at the bottom are straight out of consideration, seemingly:-)

  17. 17.

    Mary G

    @Mike E: I already have back to top arrows on my tablets (Android). It’s in a light gray box in the bottom right corner that can be hard to see, so maybe a bit more contrast would help.

  18. 18.

    tulip

    Perhaps there is a trick/shortcut that I’m unaware of, but it would be nice if there was a “jump to the bottom” of the comments for mobile devices. Right now if I’m reading a thread on my phone I have to scroll through all the comments if I leave and comeback. thx!

  20. 20.

    Alain the site fixer

    @The Other Chuck: You are correct.

    @Mike E: Doesn’t double-tapping top of the browser window jump to the top or is that just an iOS thing?

    @Starfish: That’s the #$^*#%^* plugin. I’ve explicitly disabled it for the mobile site and yet it persists. If I get a chance, I’ll take a look under the hood and see if I can tweak the code to not do that.

    @D58826: Not sure what that is, it’s not a setting that I’m aware of. Ditto for edited comments – we have a complex suite of plugins that cooperate (mostly) to provide our commenting system. Some parts such as the anti spam one have server backends that get tweaked often. I hope these moderation marking issues are solved by updating all the plugins so that they’re all the most recent level, but to some degree, this is a black box that marks things for moderation and we have limited control or ability to train it better.

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I’ll see what I can do. I had tried to introduce a better editor for the comments but it was too many troubles. If I get everything else going well relatively easily, I’ll see if I can’t re-examine that. Since we don’t require logging in to comment, WordPress doesn’t save things you type into the comment form; caching and auto-save seem to be related to having logged in users. So no promises!

    @gvg: Great idea, I’ll see what I can do.

    More later, must go melt some swiss to accompany my ham and roasted tomatoes. Destination: toast

  22. 22.

    The Other Chuck

    I know it’s kind of out of scope, but might I suggest a graphic update to put a bottom on the balloon in the logo? Possibly bold up the logo font a bit too.

  23. 23.

    tulip

    @Mary G: Those little boxes aren’t available on my phone (they are when I access the website via my computer), maybe because it’s older. But that’s exactly what I was requesting.

  24. 24.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Mary G: I’m thinking he’s looking at the mobile site; I tried to incorporate the same controls on the mobile site but it was too much work.

    But I might up the contrast a bit on the buttons you mention, thanks for the idea.

  26. 26.

    Mike E

    @Mary G: hah! I tried the desktop button but it stays in the mobile version (chrome os)… so, no joy for us phablet users. Oh well, I’ll just resort to my usual bag of tricks (reply button to get to the bottom of an especially long thread o’comments; tap @user name to get up thread; yell at clouds and hit refresh simultaneously:-)

    ETA desktop now works! It finally switched when I published this comment

  28. 28.

    Mike E

    @Alain the site fixer: desktop version works, but the mobile version is a lot more ‘readable’ so those buttons would allow us phone peeps to enter Utopia… but I understand the difficulties now, thanks

  29. 29.

    Humboldtblue

    I’m a Firefox user, Alain, and I have noticed since you completed the latest upgrade that when I try to return to the main page after reading a post and the comments it does not work. Instead I have to click on the main header logo to get back to the front page. I have noticed this on three computers, a work desktop, home desktop and a laptop.

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @The Other Chuck:

    I suggest paying special attention to what shomi hates and serving that version of the site to him.

    It appears to me that what it hates is all of the front pagers, and any version of the site is going to send that to it.

  34. 34.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Alain the site fixer:

    Since we don’t require logging in to comment, WordPress doesn’t save things you type into the comment form; caching and auto-save seem to be related to having logged in users. So no promises!

    I use Chrome on Windows for almost all of my activity here. When I have a post disappear, it’s easy to get the edit window back (Alt-LeftArrow) and it’s fully populated again. (That doesn’t seem to happen in Firefox, last I checked.) The problem is, if the post disappears on the site it either truly vanishes, or it ends up in moderation without any indication that that is what happened (and there’s the risk of multiple copies being posted if the dungeon is cleared out).

    So, at least in my case, the issue isn’t losing the text from my browser for editing, it’s getting it to show up on the site at all.

    Don’t spend a lot of time on it – I’m sure it’s a difficult problem to troubleshoot given all the black boxes you have no control over…

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  37. 37.

    MazeDancer

    @Humboldtblue:

    Happens for me, too. (Firefox, Mac). Clicking on the back arrow button to return to the home page does not work. But same computer, using Safari, back arrow does work. So could be a Firefox thing. (Or, full confession, Ghostery. Without Ghostery there are many sites I just can’t visit, because the load is so long and cloggy, so gave in to the ease of it.)

    Also, as others have mentioned, there are visual aspects of Cleek’s filter that make for easier readability. One that is especially helpful is that every other comment is shaded light gray. Makes it so much easier to scroll and read.

    As does having the poster’s name in bold black type. Separates each comment more clearly when it’s less a sea of all same weight type on white. (Of course, if you’re using Cleek’s filter the b.g. is not stark white either.)

  41. 41.

    Miss Bianca

    @Jeff: Oh NO – I hate Disqus. Why on *Earth* would you suggest any such thing? What’s wrong with the comment section, for all love?

Comments are closed.