BeOSNews.com » Site Updates

Site Updates
Stephen B. - February 20th, 2008

It’s been a little while since any significant changes were made to the site, but I finally got around to making a few little tweaks and upgrades that had been planned for a while now. Much of the work needed was cleanup-type stuff: a few dead sites have been removed from the links and the RSS Aggregate page (looks like HaikuNews.org is gone now, not sure how I managed to miss that).

Some changes were also made to the commenting system – read on for the details.

Update on the Updates: a few people have mentioned CSS / display quirks related to the comment system updates. Some changes were made to the site’s CSS stylesheet in the course of doing the comment updates – my best guess is that some browsers may have cached outdated copies of the stylesheet file. If you’re seeing problems with the layout breaking or with inconsistent text formatting on the comments page, please try forcibly-reloading (on most browsers, Shift-clicking the reload button will do that) and/or clearing out your cache. If you still see the problem after doing that, please post a message in the comments to this article with the browser software & version that you’re using.

Also, I managed to find a plugin that fixes the one small deficiency of WordPress relative to the old blogging/CMS software I had been using (BBlog): replies to comments and comment threading. If you’ve read any individual articles or browsed their comments today, then you were “priveleged” to be able to watch as the comments display suddenly became hideously ugly, and then was slowly cleaned up.

The result is that you can now post a reply to a specific comment, either by clicking the “reply” link next to the commenter’s name or by choosing a comment from the dropdown menu above the comment textbox. When it’s posted, the reply will appear indented below the “parent” post, which should make it easier to follow longer discussions. And last, there’s also a small aesthetic tweak: an outline and background colour was added to each comment post, to make it a bit easier to visually distinguish between individual posts.

Now I just have to find a plugin for quoting comments, and I’ll have taken care of all my pet-peeves with web-based discussion software.

Category: News - Comments RSS - Post a Comment - Trackback

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12 Comments

Manette.be on 2008-02-20 at 07:53 (Reply)

Hey, nice ! ...and if it is possible to have a plug-in for pictures and thumbnails, would be nice too :-)

Stephen B. on 2008-02-20 at 14:05 (Reply)

If enough people are interested, I may do that - there seem to be no shortage of "gravatar" plugins for WordPress.

Bichuf on 2008-02-20 at 08:19 (Reply)

Good but, your CSS does not work correctly in Safari or in OmniWeb.

Stephen B. on 2008-02-20 at 14:24 (Reply)

Just gave it a try in the Win32 beta of Safari, I see what you mean. I'll try some tweaking for it later on, but I'm not sure how much I can do given that Safari already has other weird rendering bugs with the site that I don't encounter in FF, IE, or Opera (E.g., even just on the main page, Safari somehow manages to mess up the positioning of the left column border).

Oscar Lesta on 2008-02-20 at 10:09 (Reply)

Good to see updates, but something you did break the page.
It looks bad in both Firefox and IE 6.

The problem is in the right margin: the text extends beyond its bounds in FF, not in IE, but in both a portion of the "02-top_bg.gif" image is shown at the right.

Also, this very Text editing control is wider than it should, even the submit button is out of bounds :)

Have you hired JasonC as your HTML/CSS consultor? :-D

Stephen B. on 2008-02-20 at 14:29 (Reply)

Were you viewing the site while I was making the changes, by any chance? I remember those specific problems as ones that I ran into (and fixed) while getting the new comment display working. It's possible that the stylesheet file was cached in your browser - can you try a "force refresh" (Shift-click the Refresh button) - or clear the cache and try reloading?

Oscar Lesta on 2008-02-21 at 10:03 (Reply)

Aha! Yesssir, the outdated/cached CSS file was the guilty. All good now. Excellent!

Stephen B. on 2008-02-20 at 14:30 (Reply)

Hell no, have you ever *seen* the BeDope(r) code? :)

Oscar Lesta on 2008-02-21 at 10:06 (Reply)

I actually did, that was why I thought JasonC was involved :P

Oscar Lesta on 2008-02-20 at 10:21 (Reply)

And while I'm in picky-mode:

* Comments are in serif font, while the rest of the site uses sans-serif.
* News text is grey, comments are black.

Make up your mind dude! :-P

(I like it sans and grey)

Stephen B. on 2008-02-20 at 15:58 (Reply)

The comment text *should* be sans-serif as well, at least that's how the styles are set and how it appears here.

What browser versions are you using?

Here's a few screenshots of what it looks like when I test it here:

IE7 - IE6 - Firefox (2.0.0.12) - Opera (8.54) - Safari

Safari is the only browser where I can still see breakage happening on this end.

Rasukifefa on 2010-02-11 at 07:33 (Reply)

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