We needed to update the blog because the old theme was no longer being maintained by WordPress, and we were having security problems and issues with the comment screening. So we replaced it with this new theme which was having some issues. We patched it so now it’s functional, but I’ve been told it isn’t so great on phones.
I just wanted to let you know that we’re working on putting together something that looks a little better, less whitespace, things like that. It’s not as easy as you might think, in particular because we’ve got tons of content that you want to read, also we want to make the commenting experience as easy as possible under the constraints of security and not getting overwhelmed by spam. Thanks for your patience!
I thought the previous format vastly superior. Black and white is rather dreary more so when you examine its P value!!
It’s terrible, Andrew. I could tell you why. But, I think you should a/b test. Pick some random designs and then gradually work towards a design that your random sampled set is the most satisfied with. (Whatever the new design is, it’s difficult to imagine that it’s worse than this.)
Not and Sam:
Unfortunately the previous design was no longer available. We need to use a theme that is being maintained and is secure.
I’m sure the new design will be better than this. For security reasons we wanted to change right away, and the theme we’re using now is available.
If you or others have particular remarks about problems with the current theme or suggested improvements, feel free to add these in the comments, and I can add them to the current list of issues.
Allan and John Williams comments are accurate and I agree with them.
I’m not sure I can properly diagnose all the things that are wrong with it, but it is possibly the worst theme I’ve seen actually in production. It feels more like a placeholder. On a desktop, the text content area is way too wide to read conformably. The minimalism is boring to the extent that I thought the CSS hadn’t loaded all the way. The names of commenters is too small. Comments only sometimes switch colors as they nest down a reply chain and what is up with the irregular patterning of the comment colors. When writing comments, the text moves around disconcertingly if you click between text boxes. Even the little triangles making the comments look like speech bubbles annoys me.
There are so many great themes out there. IMHO, burn this one with fire and start over. Two seconds of googling will yield some better more modern examples (e.g. https://preview.themeforest.net/item/writing-blog-personal-blog/full_screen_preview/11547928 ).
(sorry… I may have had an overly visceral emotional reaction to this theme)
And why (on my browser) is my name in the parent comment indented, but names in top level comments are not?
Here is another nice one with some good reviews. https://soledad.pencidesign.net/soledad-simple/?demo=classic&sidebar=right
Ian:
Yes, it is a placeholder! I thought that had been made clear in the above post. Because of security issues we wanted to get rid of the old theme right away.
Ah, my reading comprehension could use some work :).
When perusing the comments I’ve always liked the ability to be able to discern the author’s identity relatively quickly. With the new format, unless a name is connected to an email (where it becomes orange highlighted), the commentator name is super tiny relative to the text around it.
If I have any sway on the new design ideally I’d like to see the names more pronounced
My old eyes aren’t as sensitive to contrast as they used to be, so I find it easier to read things that are black and white, like the black letters that I’m typing now. Once the comment is posted, they will be black on grey, and I will have more trouble reading them. Similarly, the orange letters are a problem, especially on the darker grey background such as your reply to Not and Sam above.
Is it possible to turn off nested comments? Something closer to the Stan Forums is what I would prefer to see.
I like this format better than the old one. It looks fine on my phone.
I like nested comments—that feature helps me keep track of the relationship between the comments.
Bob76
Bob:
What sort of phone software do you have? Perhaps the blog looks good on some phones but not others?
I have a droid phone. This format is much better on my phone. I was surprised when you said it was bad for phones because both my experience and the bulk of the comments seem to disagree.
On my phone, once the comments get deeply nested (like this one) they get very narrow. This one will look something like:
On my phone, on
ce the comments
get deeply nested
(like this one) they
get very narrow. T
his one will look s
omething like:…
Yes, now I see that. Phone is better for reading the main article but very bad for comments. On my phone
s
o
m
e
l
o
o
k
like that!
+1
I would advise you to set a limit on the width of the content area for the main body of the text, so text doesn’t spill out to be endlessly wide. There’s a reason why books are physically longer than they are wide.
I think they took my recommendations and this is why it breaks on mobile. I just tested on my PC, but for mobile you probably want to change this:
.commentlist > li.comment {
width: 900px;
}
To this:
.commentlist > li.comment {
width: 100%;
}
I mean changing it to 100% should work for both PC and mobile. I actually already did that for my local overwriting and it is the same on the PC.
Anon:
Thanks. We did your suggested change.
Yes, looks good on a desktop, but a disaster on a mobile (medium of choice for breakfast surfing).
In comments, when I Ctrl-+ to get larger type (in Chrome) the text field just gets wider (and off screen)
In the article it works as I expect and the text is reformatted to fit the window width
It would be nice if the comments reformatted as well
Reading these comments, I have the urge to wonder why the world needs to cater to the mobile phone. Frankly, I don’t care what it looks like on a phone – is there something wrong with using a laptop or desktop? Yes, phones can be used on the run, in the waiting room, in the market, etc., but those are hardly the places to promote careful considered reasoning. I feel like phones cater to a twitter mentality, and designing this blog to work on these devices puts it on a slippery slope towards that end.
I would say that most of the readers of this blog are careful and considered and I expect that would carry over to their use of phones to read the blog. But, over time, I fear that it will invite less considerate readers and may also invite current readers to react more quickly and concisely a la Twitter.
Because we only have so many hours in a day and most of the hours spent in front of a laptop or desktop we’re doing what we get paid to do.
The phone is always in my pocket and I can look at things like this blog any time I have five minutes. Usually away from my desk.
It has gotten better on my phone.
It loads quite fast.
Still is a bit hard to read in that it could use more contrast.
I would suggest limiting the nesting to maybe three levels (maybe you’ve done that already?) – the text box width gets unusably narrow beyond that.
Is there anyway to get the most recent comments list more easily available on mobile? As it is now it only appears on the main page and only if you scroll all the way to the bottom).
Would love to have an edit feature as well as formatting options.
Can you incorporate a way to “remember” identifying info so that name and email don’t need to be entered for every comment? Is there a reason you don’t have that feature (I.e., as you get with a login in most WordPress blog interfaces)?
I think the update looks great. And I like that there are now author bylines for the posts.
You should put the timestamp on not only the blog comments, but also the main articles.