Further Tweaking
Posted on July 11, 2015 Posted by John Scalzi 45 Comments
If you’re visiting Whatever via Web and mobile, you’ll notice I’ve changed up the theme again; the new version is slightly less twitchy and a little bit more basic functionality (like dates/times in comments, etc). I may fiddle with the look a little bit more, but I think this is going to be it for a while.
thank goodness. I thought you said twerking.
Don’t tempt me.
@Miles Archer: So did I, and I was afraid to click upon it. Hopefully Athena would put a stop to that.
The ‘comment count’ in the post heading (meta line) showed (before I did this one) ‘3’ comments. Then when you look at the comments, the heading there shows ‘2 thoughts’.
Like!
Twerk for us, Scalzi! Twerk for us!
Important question here, John – do you wake up crying? Did you have a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo?
MUCH better! Goodbye green bar.
Also: where are the tweets?
Bah. I do not like the flat gray background. I won’t pay for this any more!
That’s an awesome shot of Krissy in London.
I miss the twitter feed too…
FWIW: Gray is good (so I’m upping my subscription), and the rotating and not so gynormous header is also good. As usual, the Less is usually the More…
Please add back the Twitter feed. I’m not on Twitter, but enjoy reading your tweets here.
mngwa et al – you don’t actually need to have a twitter account to follow Scalzi there. Just go to https://twitter.com/scalzi
Wait. Us commenters are no longer blathering? Not sure if happy or sad about that.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the Twitter link return either. But if that means we get no giant overwhelming green bar, it’s good.
The twitter feed will be added back in. I didn’t realize it was gone.
Another vote for Like. Much better than the big green thing. (Although I have to admit, as a Stylish user on Firefox, I shrank it down right away so I didn’t suffer.)
good riddance to the green thing! I was thinking up an email to send out to the proprietor. Some of my (former) favorite sites have added a top bar that uses up a lot of my usable visual space (I am looking at you ESPN and Boston.com) and drove me away. also charles pierce drove me away with that “in which” phrasing that annoys me every time I see it, and the green thing had the same impact on me. So I will be back to visiting daily now. Thanks for the change! (PS the color scheme could be little more upbeat IMHO than battleship gray)
Thank Humanity I wasn’t the only one that thought John was Twerking. I was expecting my eyes to be assaulted with a video of said twerking, and ready to send in a couple of bucks just because he had the ‘nads to post such a video… even if I needed to expend copius $s on brain/eye bleach… because ya know… John twerking might be “oh so wrong”, but the temptation to watch would be priceless.
As for the color of the current theme.. bleh. Not battleship grey… I’ve been on a battleship… and an aircraft carrier. It doesn’t have that “let’s pep up the sailors” that battleship grey does. This is more like super-bland government institution grey, with the sole purpose of making us feel like soulless social security numbers (with picture I.D.).
Gah… one last comment. If you do decide to “twerk”, may I suggest Firestarter by The Prodigy? I might send 3 bucks just because….
Yeah, I think this is darker than battleship gray.
Don’t listen to DigitalAtheist. We ain’t sending money for twerking. Or money for not twerking.
Having the dates etc in light gray sucks. Lack of contrast. Nearly unreadable.
Also, does that script software automatically do caps lock? I HATE caps lock. (And I praise Apple every day because the Mac actually allows me to disable the caps lock key ;-) )
jmo of course
@Lurkertype, I thought we were all about the “solidarity” and stuffz. Money spent for John to twerk or not twerk is money… well pretty much tossed into a bonfire during a drunken midnight revel, but it IS money.. well.. I just can’t find a way to make it seem like we cured cancer or anything…
I like the gray. Very soothing to the eyes, although I do agree that the dates could be darker.
Is it just me or is it loading really slowly?
I quite like the grey, and the white type stands out well enough for my middle-aged eyesight. I’m getting used to the fact that there is more than one picture as the header, and I’m particularly liking ‘SOON’, featuring Lopsided Cat. And it’s very good to have date/time refs for posts again (I’d prefer numbered posts but I’m just old-fashioned that way :) ).
I like the Nucleare theme but I don’t like the grey. Otherwise very nice.
Sooz:
The numbered posts are unlikely to come back in any recent-model WordPress theme because WordPress allows for threaded comments. I don’t use them, but for the sites that do (which I suspect are most of them), numbering would be not useful.
Am I the only person who doesn’t find a comment link at the end of each main post on the main page? I can get to the comment thread by clicking on a comment from the “Recent Comments” list on the right-hand side, but I don’t see a comment link at the end of each main post. Nor do I see how many comments were made until I can get into the thread by clicking on someone else’s comment.
Love the photo of Krissy in the banner! And I do appreciate the absence of that weird green bar at the top of the page. But the white-font-on-grey-background is really, really hard for my old eyes to read. Your site, your choice, of course.
I too read the title as Twerking. This of course raised the question of when the original Twerk occurred if this was a further twerk. A quick google hunt failed to yield any useful results sadly. Then of course I came back and re-read the title. I guess we can only dream.
Tweaking the tweakable? Anyway, this is better.
Perhaps there is a WordPress theme designer reading this. If there is:
Dear WordPress theme designer: pretty please make a nice theme with unthreaded comments and comment numbers? Or a plugin to add comment numbers to an existing theme? Not that I know what I’m talking about (I know nothing about how WordPress works), but hope springs eternal.
Dear Colonel,
Took me a moment to find it, too. It’s now at the top of each column, in the subhead, on the right side next to the author’s name.
pax / Ctein
Well, this is nifty: love the ferns on the main page and then a random selection of End of All Things art on the comments page. Darker grey makes the white more contrasty and is more soothing than the previous white background. But the ferns!! So good!!
I like the look of this theme. Nice and clean, very modern.
I like it a lot! For the color, maybe you could try Ocean grey instead?
* Red Dwarf Series 1, Episode 6?
Hi, John. With both this theme and the last one, I can’t zoom in with Safari on an iPad mini. I encounter this on some other blogs, but used to be able to zoom in on yours so that the text was easier to read, especially the comments.
If this is intentional, no worries. Just thought you might like to be aware in case it isn’t.
I really enjoy Whatever. Among many reasons, my Kindle is full of titles I’ve discovered through your recommend-a-book posts.
Let the record reflect these acres of gray on the margins are not working for me.
If I enable Flash, will I see the twerking? ((it’s always set to “Never Activate” on my machines))
But seriously, man – Flash?? Whatever. ;-)
What memorial is that in the banner(non-American here)?
It’s a memorial in Perth, Australia, actually, to Australian soldiers in various actions in the Pacific.
I just realized that there are purple lines separating the various bits of white text on the right-hand side. They are almost invisible. Just FYI.
The only trouble is the comments link at the *top* of the post. Not an issue in this entry, but the longer posts — the more interesting ones, the ones that generate the richest discussion in the comment threads — force the reader to scroll all the way back up to the beginning of the post in order to jump to the comments. Is there a way to put the date / author at the top of a post and the comments link at the bottom?
Yea, what Stephen McNeil said. Read doooown an interesting post and …. scroll baaaack to the top to get to the comments. Glad the green bar is gone though, thanks! And I’m not a Twitter follower either so glad you have it linked here.