Don’t worry readers, I’m trying an experiment. WUWT has looked the same for about 3 years, so I’m giving it a makeover. I’ve activated a newly designed theme for WUWT. This one has advantages over the old one in that it does a better job of supporting newer hi-res monitors such as the 20-24″ LCD/HDTV models that are becoming popular.
It also provides for larger text and images, better visibility of links, plus a few other features including a custom background which I’ll get to later.
In the meantime, let me know what you think in the poll below.
Sadly, no I still can’t offer an edit feature. wordpress.com hosting doesn’t support it.
UPDATE: Some readers say they can’t see links on the right side. They are there, try the horizontal scrollbar or set your monitor to a higher resolution. Also, wordpress during the upgrade nuked all my widgets on the right hand side, working to restore them -A
UPDATE: all the sidebar widgets are now restored. -A
UPDATE from CTM: Firefox users should install the CA assistant and greasemonkey.
http://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
This gives you full previews and some preview and formatting buttons.
Make sure to set your installation settings to not hide old comments or much will disappear.
Comment Tab:
- “Old” and “New” comments are defined by age in hours.
- You can hide all old comments (default: 48 hours). Hiding older comments is a great way to simplify your view of more intense discussions. (On Lucia and RomanM’s sites, the content of old contents disappears, but Author/Date remain. Nice!)
Sorry, it doesn’t work on my computer (iMac using Firefox 2.0020). Was a great site.. please fix!!! (The comments come out in the sidebar, so I was able to scroll down and post this comment, others with same problem may not perservere so you wouldn’t know) cheers Warren
REPLY: Firefox 2.0 is ancient, which is likely the problem, why not upgrade?-A
Finally you are fixing the included smiling face at the bottom of the old theme!
That is good.
OTOH, it is too bright, and the information density is too low.
The banner image at the top needs a rework. It looks like you rasterized a purple
font at 40 dpi on top of a higher resolution image. With the new drawing size,
the rasterization is wrong. The low-contrast smoothing effect now looks wrong
on the black background.
I like the larger fonts. I found it hard to read the older one. It would be nice to be able to select a comment and reply to it.
Wow. Don’t need these 3x reading glasses. Think I’ll drop back down to 250
A couple of things I don’t like with this new format, it’s not as easy to use:
— Your own comment is not shown after you press submit. This forces you to keep a seperate copy so you can refer to the information within your own recent comment if and when needed.
— There is nothing, color or underline, to differentiate between normal type and an embedded link when you go to the trouble to wrap one in an A tag without hovering over it. Someone would never know it is there unless you place words to point that out.
— And your name and email doesn’t seem to be persistent anymore. Have to type it in each comment, or am I missing something.
I don’t know; I’m skeptical.
Ric Werme: Thank you for also trying to use a version of SuSE Linux way past its use-by date. 🙂 I’m running 8.2 on a back-end server, but not my regular desktop system.
Have you tried downloading the latest Firefox (now 3.6) from http://www.mozilla.com and installing it, without that woefully-slow version of YaST in the way? Or get the latest Opera from http://www.opera.com for your libc version.
Change is always difficult to appreciate at first (unless it is really, really good). With that being said, I don’t think I like this. Seems to be too elementary (school, that is) and way too bright. Oh well, I need to start cutting down by internet time anyway.
REPLY: The “it is too bright” complaint is quite puzzling, since the body text background color is the same on both the old and new theme is identical RGB values of 255,255,255 i.e. pure white – A
I vote for the home page link to return. It was the quickest way to get back to the list of the latest summaries.
REPLY: I have no control over the theme contents on wordpress.com, but I have made the suggestion to the authors and I’m not the only one to have made that suggestion.
You can click on the words “Watts Up With That” and that takes you to the home page – A
As you said, we must like it or leave. So why have a poll? Don’t get too full of yourself there buddy. You will start going bald and end up looking like that Romm dude.
REPLY: Firefox 2.0 is ancient, which is likely the problem, why not upgrade?-A
I don’t like that attitude. My cell phone company told me that once, said I had to buy a new phone because mine was three years old. Just keep buying a new thing whether you want it or not or can afford it or not. I say piss on you all that believe that is the right way to do business. This is one of many of the attitudes that is driving the global warming hysteria.
Reply: Interesting logical leap to global warming hysteria, but seriously, legacy support is an issue about which every technology provider has to make judgment calls. Is it worth compromising the experience for 95% of your audience because of the intransigence of a few? It is always a judgment call when to pull the plug on a legacy support issue, not an “attitude”. ~ ctm
ErnieK says:
April 27, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Mr. Pete’s CA-assistant no longer works within the comment section (Preview and comment tools still seem to work though).
REPLY: It was never intended to work here, I never offered support for it. -A
It looks like someone else intended it to work here. Right-click the Greasemonkey logo, click on “Manage User Scripts,” and be introduced by CA-A to the “Open Science webring” where WUWT is an included site.
Which in no way changes that Mr. Watts has no responsibility concerning CA Assistant whatsoever, just be glad it works here at all. Functionally the only things lost are the optional age-based coloring of the names, which was of limited value, and the hiding of the oldest comments, which was likewise. The new system of links to specific comments with the time/date stamps actually seems more usable than the old “Reply with” function, which always worked buggy for me.
If Mr. Pete decides to, he may rework his CA-Assistant script to again fully work on WUWT. Although I would rather hope this inspires him to make something that works for a WordPress site in general, as opposed to how the current version is apparently expecting certain things with a certain theme to properly work.
WUWT has looked the same for about 3 years, so I’m giving it a makeover.
Wrong reason.
I’m with Gary 9:40. A severe case of scroller’s finger tells me that the new design is not an improvement, either. The extensive spacing is mannered, the ‘says’ after the commentor’s name precious and the verbose datestamp parochial.
It’s also disappointing that you haven’t chosen a design that allows the user to scale the font with the text size option.
REPLY: No reason to be disappointed. Simply use CTRL+ Mouse Wheel or or CTRL++/CTRL– to scale the font. Works great unless you are running an ancient browser that doesn’t support it. As for the others, I’m a veteran of TV news, and I run this blog much like a TV station. 3 years is a long time in TV to have the same graphics and layout, and I believe the same for a blog too. There’s other reasons for using this new theme too, which will become clearer with the WordPress 3.0 upgrade coming in May. -Anthony
I wasn’t asking for sympathy! (In earlier posts I did ask for a dimmer
background and a better hint list of HTML tags.)
I did figure out the key parts, not surprisingly they’re not practical for me to do unless I write some sort of filter, which I might do to highlight my favorite commenters.
At any rate, the two wide-column format seems due to this in style.css:
#main{overflow:hidden;padding:40px 0 0 0;}
I disabled it by changing main to mainxx and my decrepit Firefox
displays things as you intended. I’m not certain what the CSS code
means, so no promises may change will work elsewhere.
The too-bright background is due to
#wrapper{background:#fff;padding:0 20px;}
Changing #fff to #ccc (light gray) or #bcd (pastal blue) looks good to me.
The text is dark gray due to
#content textarea{color:#444;font-size:16px;line-height:24px;}
Using #222 (darker gray) or #000 (black) looks better to me.
REPLY: The “too light background” was exactly the same on the old blog theme: 255, 255, 255 or fff. -A
Some readers say they can’t see links on the right side. They are there, try the horizontal scrollbar or set your monitor to a higher resolution.
There is no more information on the page than there was before. Why do we now have to scroll sideways or adjust our resolution to view this website?
As it happens, I do have a wide hi-res monitor. In my work I need to have multiple windows open, so I am not very happy about WUWT now taking up two-thirds of the monitor. Bad.
REPLY:There’s another simple solution, no grouching needed. Use CTRL+ mousewheel or CTRL++/CTRL– to change the size of the blog and text – A
Son of a beast! There’s an auto-correct function working!
I just posted a comment where I used “Wordpress” (lower case p), and in the “awaiting moderation” view it was changed to the “official” “WordPress” with a capital P. I ctrl-a ctrl-c (copy to Notepad) my comments before posting, thus I am certain I used the lower-case as that’s what was copied. Yet that wasn’t good enough for WordPress so it got changed by WordPress. How rude!
Is there anything in the WordPress TOS that says to all users (mere commentators included) “Thou shalt properly capitalize the name of WordPress lest it shall be done for thee”?
Testing:
repeating lower-case p: WordPress
all lower-case: wordpress
w lower-case, p upper-case: wordPress
Is it worth compromising the experience for 95% of your audience because of the intransigence of a few? It is always a judgment call when to pull the plug on a legacy support issue, not an “attitude”. ~ ctm
The Warmers/Socialists think the same way Charles. The skeptics are the “intransigence of a few” to them. They know exactly what is right for you and for me. And if you don’t agree it is because you just don’t know what is right yet. Think about it.
Bernd Felsche says:
April 27, 2010 at 9:07 pm
I’m kind of warming up to the idea of a virtualized Linux system at home, but I have enough interconnected things (e.g. Python, my weather station software, and MySQL), that a piecemeal upgrade is as frustrating an idea as a fresh install.
It’s been over a year since I tried upgrading Firefox, I forget what it wanted upgraded, but it was clear that by the time I did those and all their dependencies that I should stick with what was working as long as it works. I got sufficiently burned once when I upgraded Python and most of RedHat’s printer utilities stopped working. YouTube now displays a nasty message about my Firefox too. Maybe in November I’ll have time….
Opera is a possibility, the Konqueror on the system seems to work, but there are a couple Firefox plugins that are nice (“It’s All Text” to kick editing to emacs and Flashblock are the two main ones).
I could also see setting up a new system as a test system that can be shutdown for days at a time or reinstalled with the distro du jour and leave the old system as a file and app server.
Thanks for your response, Anthony.
It’s probably just the shock of the new – my wife thinks the new theme is a great improvement, so this is the opinion I now hold…
BTW: I’m using IE8. Ctrl+mousewheel doesn’t scale the font, it zooms the page (often with horrible consequences). It is just a pity that popular blog software doesn’t pay more attention to accessibility issues.
REPLY: I just opened IE8 and found it worked quite well at scaling the blog with no consequences. Odd that it would be problematic for you. I have IE8 FF3.6, Safari, Opera, and Chrome all loaded on my system, and all seem to work well. Baffling -A
Preview test
Preview test
Preview test
Preview test
Ok guys, go install the CA assistant and greasemonkey.
http://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
This gives you full previews and formatting buttons.
Update Make that some preview and edit functions. Not all work ~ ctm
If it aint broke, why fix it? Some say easier on the eye, but not if you have low vision, e.g. Macular Degeneration
For me the new version is not printer-friendly………..
Re: charles the moderator on April 27, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Reloaded CA-A, still don’t get the age-based coloring…
And will the sub- and superscript finally work, for someone not signed in as an administrator?
Sub: Preview test
Super: Preview test
Reply: I don’t get aged based coloring either on this site, but the formatting buttons do not appear to be a function of my admin status. I will try again logged out. ~ ctm
Bold Preview
Italic Preview
Superscript
Subscript
Hmmm…there may be something to this admin function and formatting. Must test more.