Dear WaterGirl,
I just travelled around the world in my hot air balloon, and now that I am back, I’m wondering if you guys made any changes to the new site while I was gone.
Dear Wow, That’s Amazing!
And here I thought we had accomplished a lot this week! Let’s see… We switched from the lovely blue-green-gray background on block quotes to a possibly-more lovely blue outline with a shadow. People seem to like that a lot; hopefully you will, too.
We increased the size of the space you get when you press RETURN, so we think people won’t feel the need to press RETURN twice between their paragraphs. That should go a long way toward decreasing extra white space we’ve been seeing.
We also made a change to the comment numbers; they are a bit smaller and should size better on all devices. (Bye-bye tiny little numbers on phones!) Oh, and we changed the pie filter font that you see when you select quotes instead of images.
Dear WaterGirl,
What about the loyal On the Road people? What have you done for us lately?? Writing not just for myself, you understand, but for all of us.
Dear On the Road Peeps,
Well, let’s see. We moved On the Road from Featuring in the sidebar to the category bar at the top. We hope that was a nice surprise! But we took away something, too; we hope you won’t mind. You won’t see duplicate images anymore when the most recent post on Balloon Juice happens to be an On the Road post. Going forward, you’ll just have to be satisfied with a single copy of all those gorgeous images.
Dear WaterGirl,
Have there been any changes that would specifically affect front pagers? We love change!
Dear Front Pagers,
At long last, we added a plugin for filtering Categories and Snark to the Classic Editor, so those of you who don’t typically use the Block Editor won’t have to go to the Dark Side for ease of adding categories and snark to posts.
Dear WaterGirl,
Are there any little things we might want to know, that we may not know already?
Dear Inquiring Minds…
Yes! That’s an excellent question!
Did you know you can make the comment box longer, so you can see your entire comment, even if it’s long? Just drag the little thingie (technical term) that’s at the bottom of the comment box until it’s the size you want. The little thingie is to the right of the little P that people ask about, and it works in the Reply box as well as in the comment box at the bottom.
Speaking of the little P, what does it do? P stands for Paragraph, so it’s saying you are in Paragraph mode. If you put your cursor inside a blockquote, it will say P and Blockquote. If something is in color, it will say P and Span (which indicates color).
Speaking of white space… the block quote feature automatically adds space around the outline of the quote, so now if you add an extra line manually, either above the quote or after it, you get a boatload of extra white space.
The RSS feed now includes the name of the BJ author, but that won’t show up in your old feed; in order to see it, you have to subscribe again.
Sometimes we refer to a location for something on the site as if that location is true for everybody. (I am definitely guilty of this!) For instance, the Pet Calendar Info is located at top right on the site, but only for computers and for tablets that are in landscape mode. Tablets in portrait mode, and phones, will show that under the hamburger. (aka the 3 lines located top right on a phone) The same is true when we talk about the sidebar – that’s only true on computers and tablets in landscape – on a phone, or a tablet in portrait mode, that’s all located after the comment window at the bottom.
THAT’S ALL THE LETTERS FOR TODAY. I’LL CONTINUE TO DO THIS FOR A BIT UNTIL EVERYBODY IS UP TO SPEED.
