As you can see, my revamped homepage is up and running — just in time for hurricane season — and, unlike last time, it appears to be stable (knock on wood).
The layout may not look all that much different, but it’s actually operating off of a completely different set of templates (albeit ones that I modifed to look quite a lot like my old ones). The new templates allowed me to add the right-hand sidebar, and make other beneficial changes — including fixing the pop-up comments! That’s right, they aren’t just functional, they’re actually working better than ever! I finally figured out how to make the “Preview” feature work in the pop-up window, so if you leave a comment, you can now see a real-time preview underneath the “Submit Comment” button. It updates as you type. Pretty nifty!
Also, to alleviate confusion among guestbloggers who would like to comment under nicknames (or as themselves when another guestblogger is logged on using the same computer — hi Mom), logged-in WordPress users will no longer see the regular “Name,” “Mail” and “Website” fields, which are meaningless when you’re logged in anyway. Instead, they will see a message that says, “You are logged in as [Your Name]. If you want to comment under another name, click here to logout and then reload this page.” Hopefully that will clarify things and make the comment section more user-friendly for all you guestbloggers.
As always, this is a work-in-progress, and I’ll be tinkering with it over the coming days and weeks. Slowly but surely, I hope to move toward some of the longer-term redesign goals that we discussed months ago… but for now, I’m just happy to get my hurricane blogroll up-and-running (to be followed by others, like my “Notre Dame blogroll,” my “USC blogroll,” etc.) and make a few other important changes. Anyway, I welcome any and all comments, suggestions and complaints. (On the latter point, if something appears to be broken, please let me know! And by the way, yes, I know commenting has been painfully slow in the last couple of days. I’m not sure what’s up, but I believe it’s a server issue, not a redesign issue; I’m looking into it.)
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Categories: Website News
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May 31st, 2006 at 11:32:38 pm
I don’t know if you consider this ‘broken’ but the comment windows are still not resizeable. (At least, for me anyway.) The Permalink works fine though, so it shouldn’t be a priority unless it’s a simple fix.
May 31st, 2006 at 11:37:10 pm
Eek, yeah, I forgot about that. I don’t know why that is the case, so I’m afraid it remains sort of a “back-burner” issue…
June 1st, 2006 at 5:54:08 am
Well, it looked very nice. However, for me at least, Kubrick has returned with a vengance.
(Well, I’d never SEEN the Kubrick theme on your page, so you cna’t technically say it “returned”.)
Its like something from a bad Kubrick movie! (Well, probably not. But it had to be said.)
June 1st, 2006 at 6:07:50 am
Kubrick default theme has also returned for me. (I’ve lost the right sidebar, and the archives show up by month on the right, in light blue.)
Safari 2.0.3, OS 10.4.6
June 1st, 2006 at 6:11:16 am
The pop-up comments aren’t working for me (Win XP, Firefox or IE). It takes you to the “non-pop-up” comment page. The real-time preview is working though.
Also, what happened to the left-hand sidebar? There’s nothing there for me, and I was just wondering if it was supposed to be blank there.
June 1st, 2006 at 6:12:39 am
Er — seems to have reverted to the default theme and behavior. :(
June 1st, 2006 at 6:14:23 am
I’m getting the same behavior as bink–in Firefox 1.5.0.3 as well.
June 1st, 2006 at 6:23:30 am
I miss the old layout.