ways_back_room | (no subject)

(no subject)

Hiya Folks,

If you've got a minute, could you pop on over to milliways-mods.dreamwidth.org/ and let me know what you think of the overall style of the page.
Is it readable?
Does it load okay?
How do the colors work for you?
Does it make your eyes bleed when you gaze upon it?

How about that header?

I ask because this is my practice run at the new style for the community.
The Bar Proper will have that header, but the color accents will be the same amberish we've all come to know and love.
The Back Room will have a different yet-to-be-designed header, with the same aqua/teal accents we've come to know and love.

I have a feeling that our tag list might be a bit too long, so there's a good chance important tags will be added to the Comm list on the left sidebar, but I won't know about that until I start making changes.

Which I don't want to do unless folks seem generally okay with this.
To that end:
What do ya'll think?

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I can see eternity.....

But seriously, I like it. No eye bleeding, though the page background and the entry background difference in colors might be a little too subtle if you want then to stand out from each other.

I'm on a Mac, which tends to have brighter colors.

I dig it.

But, as Don said, the color differences are a bit subtle. I'm at work and my monitors are kinda crap, so right now I can't really see the boxes from the entries vs. the background (but I see sidebar boxes just fine). It's certainly something I can live with, though, because on the bar style being used now there's no difference between background and entries and it looks just fine to me (unless there are differences, and my crappy monitor just can't see that, either. LOL.).

Also, sentence spacing seems wider, and makes entries take up a lot of space on the page, but maybe that reads easier for folks? IDK, it's just kind of large.

The banner image is awesome, I love it.

Nicely done.

A lot of stuff like spacing and kerning have to be fixed with CSS, which is what's causing the problem with the page not loading. Unfortunately, that means eliminating CSS from the stylesheet, so some things are going to be DW default.

Ah. Okie doke. I'd just never seen that on DW so thought it might've been something selected/done. I've never messed with the CSS on any of my journals, just used pre-made templates, and never had the double-spacing thing come up.

It's probably a quirk of this particular base style. We went for something that matched what we already use as closely as possible, and are only able to use DW's built-in editor to make things customised. Some styles assume you're going to use it as a base and change it up with CSS, which might have been the case here.

It won't be an issue with the threads, since comment pages won't be changed. Presumably, comment pages are where most of the reading will take place anyway.

Or maybe it's the font size. It just looks wider/bigger. Anyways, overall I like it and it'll be great to not have the CSS stuff thwarting efforts to load the page. So yay! \o/

Try loading an individual entry. When I tested this on my phone, I did it on a different journal. I didn’t realise the cast list wasn’t behind a cut, which is making everything extra weird.

Edited 2018-03-17 16:46 (UTC)

Works for me and no eye bleeding, and I'm on a windows 10 laptop.

I will be super grateful to both Zed and you guys just to have it loading, to be honest!

Looks great. Thanks for fixing it.

It looks great! I'm using a Kindle, btw. The layout changes on mobile devices, but it's not wonky at all. The sidebar just shifts to the bottom so the entries are more readable. I like it!

Another to say that it looks good and easy to read. Thank you for working on this.

Very nice! Gray and green is very soothing to the eye.

Works okay on an Android phone. The spacing is a bit weird with the big tables but it's readable. And hey, if it works!

Well done and thank you for all the hard work you've put in.

On Firefox 58.0.2 for Windows 7 and Opera 36 for Windows XP (my desktop and my antiquated netbook respectively), it's perfectly readable, although it has more whitespace than I would prefer and therefore requires more scrolling. The color scheme is decent, although on the netbook the entry background color is hard to tell apart from the page background color because of the way its screen displays pale greys, and a slightly darker green would be easier to read; it's a little washed-out right now. The header looks good.

On both Chrome and the default Samsung browser for my new Android phone, it's technically readable but significantly less so than using style=mine to load it in the

configuration_birdwatcher theme. (Which is not customized with CSS. It's one of the ones based on the Summertime layout.) No more than four words will fit on a line before it wraps to the next line, fewer if they're long words, and this can create large gulfs of whitespace when there are a couple of short words followed by a long one that won't fit on the same line. Enough text fits on the screen at once that I can read a post the size of a typical EP without difficulty, but I got lost on the page when I tried reading the FAQ from the community page on mobile. This shouldn't be a problem for the actual bar, and is only a minor inconvenience for the mod community, so long as we're not changing the entry pages from the DW default.

I think the only way to solve the Android display issues without using CSS would be to start over with a different template (which would be more work for you and probably preserve less of the familiar Milliways look when you finished), and a clunky interface on some mobile devices is definitely not worse than having the main bar page fail to load half the time or have to be refreshed about nine times before it works. It's less than ideal, but it's a functional solution, so if it's good enough for you guys it's good enough for me.

Yeah, DW’s responsive layouts kind of suck. I tried to override it, but the result was even worse. Rather than scaling the page down to fit on a mobile screen, it just endlessly scrolled to the side. :/

How does the lite style look on your phone?

EDIT:

Ah! Yes, I see what the problem is. I tried it on my phone and it’s awful. The cast list is a hard-coded table which screwed up literally everything on my phone. Try loading an individual entry and see if it gets better.

Edited 2018-03-17 16:43 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the individual entry pages will likely have the same affect, as they're currently coded for Style Journal Holder.

The Main Comm won't have that functionality turned on.

When I tested it on my phone this morning, it looked like it did when I did my initial tests. Not perfect, but also not like what's happening right now. The cast list stretches out the page, while shrinking the entry text box for some reason. When I loaded a page without the cast list, everything went back to somewhat normal.

I did try loading the tag request page just now, but it wasn't any wider than the main comm. It looks slightly improved on both the community and the entry page compared to yesterday, but by that I mean five words fit in a line instead of four.

I'd rather use style=mine than style=light if I'm overriding it, especially because using the light style makes the DW navigation bar disappear, but the light style looks OK on my phone apart from tag links being kind of cramped.

And yeah, I tried zooming out in my phone browser but that made the problem worse. The posts just took up a smaller portion of the screen instead of the layout staying at the width of the screen and the text size shrinking like I wanted. The community page doesn't let me zoom out that far, but that's the only difference I noticed on a page without the cast list.

There are two settings under Customize Your Theme that may fix this issue, but I'm not entirely sure what values would be the most beneficial.

"The width at which the layout switches from single column mode (mobile view) to multiple columns if selected (tablet view).
Set this to 0 to use multiple columns regardless of screen size"

And

"The width at which the layout switches to larger screen mode (desktop view) and can afford some extra whitespace.
Set this to 0 to keep the layout the same regardless of screen size"

I have a feeling utilizing these options will help rectify the issues you're having, but again, I'm not sure what should go in their respective fields.

That said, it's not the Contact or Cast Lists resulting in this one thin column mobile issue, because I've put both of them behind a cut, and it's still one long single thin column on my mobile Chrome Android browser.

The best I can do with this particular style, is keep the margins to as small a relative size as possible.

I'm popping offline for the afternoon, and so won't be futzing with it.
At the moment the relative margin width is 1em, with a font size of Browser Default.

Edited 2018-03-18 15:50 (UTC)

Readable and loads okay for me on Comodo Dragon with NoScript and Privacy Badger installed. Also works on my Android copy of WARP Browser, which is a privacy browser that blocks scripts and certain other web features that require external loading. Looks good overall, I think.

It'll be nice not to have to hit F5 repeatedly and then sigh and give up on the main page.

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