After 2.5 years with the same design, I’m looking to do an upgrade to WUWT to give it more modern features. I’ve got some professional help involved to do this. It will be a complete rework from the ground up with a new theme
I’ll be staying with wordpress.com as a host, since it solves all my bandwidth and DDoS attack issue with ease. That means I won’t be able to do wordpress plugins, such as a comment edit/preview feature that everyone asks about. I wish I could, but the security outweighs the convenience.
One thing I do plan is a way to keep the most viewed/discussed stories available on top longer. Some days they scroll off too fast when there’s a lot of news.
That said, I’m open to suggestions. Feel free to drop suggestions in comments.
Tell me what you want to keep, tell me what you want changed or improved. Brainstorm ideas. After all, its a community blog, so I value the input.
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Just remember: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Another vote for keeping it simple. The more bells and whistles, the more distractions from just reading the posts and comments, the slower the loading, the greater chance of something going wrong.
One thing, though. I noticed another Steve C above, who isn’t me. Any way of maintaining links between commenters’ names and emails, with perhaps a ‘name already in use’ message, or is that another security/privacy abyss waiting to open up?
And hello to the other Steve – nothing personal, you understand, but it was a bit of a surprise coming across myself before I’d commented …
Have not looked at all the features but this looked interesting and is supported by WordPress.com …
http://en.support.wordpress.com/annotum-wordpress-com-faq/
D.I. says:
I think that linking replies to comments would be useful.
—
Indented replies can work well, as it keeps related comments together. But too many indents may make a thread unreadable.
A preview button would be good, and buttons to auto apply simple HTML, such is bold.
But I like the general layout of the site
If possible standardize on an image size for every post, at least in the short version off the main page.
What would be nice is a post of the week auto pinned to the top.
Il ike your blog just the way it is.
If you do make any changes I would definitely recommend against a “like,” “dislike” buttons as I feel this makes it too easy for trolls to trash any given post. “like” and “dislike” are, in a manner of thinking just a way of getting a consensus.
As several poster above have mentioned I think a “more”/”less” option for long posts would be a good choice.
In any case thanks Anthony for a great site.
Keep it simple
ossqss said September 2, 2012 at 1:44 pm:
Leaving the doorway to switching to Linux still wide open.
The era of forced obsolescence to accommodate the M$ desire for obscene profits should be over. The wake-up call was the foisting of bloated DRM-enforcing spyware as the new Vista system, which was hugely rejected by businesses, governments, and individuals.
I just upgraded Debian on two laptops and a PC. The entire Debian distribution is available for about $15 for an 8-DVD set from assorted vendors, which includes the OS and thousands of free software programs for virtually anything you want to do, with many alternatives to assorted commercial offerings waiting to be installed. Only one set needed for as many machines as I want, with the caveats that there are different versions for 32 and 64 bit systems and for different processor families.
But I could have downloaded all of it for free, and there is a “net install” version which only downloads what you need and want. Other Linux distributions are also available, also free for the download.
How much would I have shelled out to upgrade Windoze on all three machines, provided M$ decided it would still allow me to use my old hardware? I’m finishing up the assembling of a new 64-bit machine. What does M$ demand for a fresh install of their latest OS?
Try making it wider. You can edit the PHP. I get tired of the scrolling. The downside is it might make people write longer comments to fill what they perceive as empty space (you could put the posts in a div of fixed width to preserve the current characteristics. A large postive would be posts benefitting from more space available for larger images with plenty of room for text. Maybe start with 50% wider and see how that looks.
I’ll repeat what others have asked for: My number one request is to have a preview function for posting with HTML.
yes and the preview html function is the one item I said at the beginning we couldn’t have due to plug in requirements
I am a great believer in the KISS principle. Don’t change the layout too much.
If you can manage to improve the site without damaging anything, I guess that’s good. But my personal feeling is that the internet would be a far less annoying place if web site designers operated on an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” basis. The constant replacement of simple, basic HTML that works with complex stuff that doesn’t is a pita.
I can’t think of anything about the site that is sufficiently annoying that it HAS to be fixed.
Too bad you can’t make advertizing dollars like Lubos does.
1. I like to keep trrack of what I’ve read by position on the page. So, if you keep popular articles on top, it will be (a little) more work for me.
2. I like the look & feel as is, so please don’t make changes just for the sake of making changes. (Yours is one of the web sites that I visit a couple of times a day. I regularly forward your links to friends who are running for office.)
I have one notable problem with the general site layout.
At the top toolbar, when I mouse over “Reference Pages”, the resulting vertical bar of pages occupies all the space in the browser window on this laptop (1024×768). I have to precisely place “Reference Pages” right at the top of the window to get it all in, the menu does not have scroll option.
Before you add any other reference pages, can you shorten that somehow, maybe add sub-menus to that bar?
Please keep the present font size, Anthony. So easy to read. Much appreciated by many of us.
Holy Dooley the perfessor is a Yankee-Doodle! Have the academic standards in WA dropped so much that Oz has to import its looney tunes? I’d have thought there was an over abundance of home grown clowns.
Formatting buttons and the ability to reply inline, under specific posts.
This seems to be a standard format these days, but don’t know if wordpress supports this.
Almost all of the mainstream media have accepted the fact that they have to allow comments to articles. MSNBC, and others have dealt with their mostly negative comments by only showing the last 10 or so comments. That prevents ongoing threads staying alive for very long. It really does not allow any in depth discussion and so they have escaped accountability for their slanted, biased articles.
There should be a way to keep a lively discussion alive.
Agree with many that big changes are rarely a good idea.
NESTING :: Bad idea. That would be a drastic, huge change! Just take a look at Climate Audit or Judith Curry’s for how bad it can get once you are a few levels deep.
EDITING :: Sounds good on paper but there would be thousands of edits all the time (!). Moderating is hard enough, editing would make it impossible. It works okay and is practically a necessity on highly technical blogs but there are different policies in place such as one-strike and your out, to keep the membership honest. WordPress is not designed for this, other software is, such as IDB.
PREVIEW :: Also sounds good on paper but I never see it for sites without editing. If they have such a thing for one non-editable comments it would be great of course.
SUGGESTION :: Add a button or link or contact form to each thread for people that feel the necessity to offer factual and spelling and other corrections to the moderators so they can keep them out of the permanent comments. Alternatively you might just enforce a rule that all comments with corrections are deleted in moderation and ask commenters to submit separate posts for commentary and corrections. Typically a typo in the top post will lead to a string of permanent comments about it, with Anthony or mods having to say “done” over and over.
SUGGESTION :: I always felt that in the comment section text area, the margins were a little too big. In other words there is extra whitespace to the left and right of the comment text. If you scroll to where it says xx Responses (right above the first comment) you see that the left margin is increased further compared to the top post, the right one matches it, but really both are too big leaving shorter sentences as a result. Perhaps the actual page width itself should also be widened but that might screw up mobile screens.
BUG :: There is that strange bug in the comment box, a javascript or CSS error that seems to almost randomly decide what height to make it. Sometimes it jumps to full size of the text you paste in, at other times it is 3 lines high (right this very second the SOB is exactly 3 lines high. Arrrghh!). The programmer responsible should be waterboarded. And then punished. This seems to be confined to this blog, not other WordPress sites that I have seen.
BUG :: The cookies for WordPress might be set to expire too quickly (my speculation, haven’t researched it). Sometimes you need to login to WordPress to post, sometimes not, there is no rhyme or reason to the interval either. This is on all WordPress blogs. But I’m not sure if it is browser dependent or not, sorry. And it might be between WordPress and Gravatar.
Overall, it is nearly perfect now, I would suggest only bug fixes and choose whatever theme very carefully!
Please DO NOT add the “like/dislike” (thumbs up/thumbs down) to your site.
Many a site gets itself bogged down with the popularity contests that comes with this feature – people bragging about number of likes, or upset at the number of dislikes. It also draws out the trolls who will show up to try and “downgrade” a particular post or poster.
One site in particular (WeatherUnderground) added this feature, and tied the ability to see “good” posts based on the number of dislikes – allowing people to deliberately “dislike” everything a particular poster says (no matter what the content), making posters disappear, and forcing admin to go in and clear out the counters.
I personally don’t care if someone likes or dislikes a post I make. They’ll have every opportunity to comment on it later on.
Personally I could do without the ~20 second dead pause that Facebook imposes on each and every one of your pages at open time (that is for those that have opt-ed out of the Facebook party and run at high security themselves☺).
Comment – Right now WUWT is a site that is pretty mobile-friendly. Please don’t go for too many bells&whistles that complicates (or slows) rendering for mobile devices. Some sites just overly complicate with too much ancillary content.
Wants- Other than that – I enjoy the reading blogs with the ‘nested’ comment feature – as it makes commenting more relevant and ‘punchy’…? Not sure if it is possible, but it is a ‘nice to have’ features vs. the ‘must haves’ like security and mobile device support.
Great job Anthony!
TFNJ says: September 2, 2012 at 1:53 pm
The solar reference pages are a mess.
The biggest issue I saw was a bunch of broken links due to the shut down of Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT):
I’ve removed these broken links.
Many graphs have no axis labelling
We can’t really help with the axis labeling, WUWT is simply an aggregator, all of the data is linked from third party sources. You would need to go to the source of a particular graph in order to try to get the axis labels added/changed.
some expanatory text would be helpful.
Can you be more specific, e.g. are there particular graphs or sections where explanatory text would be helpful?
Old Ranga from Oz says:
September 2, 2012 at 5:06 pm
“Please keep the present font size, Anthony. So easy to read. Much appreciated by many of us.”
Use “ctrl +” to magnify the font size in your browser, “ctrl -” to decrease again. Works in firefox and IE.
Anthony,
In general, I think the site works very well–it’s clean, as many have said, and easy to read.
I’ve found contributing articles confusing, though. The main thing is that when I send in an article pasted from Word, the formatting is lost, including paragraphing. It would be nice to get a WSIWYG submission window, including graphics (submitting graphics is also a bit complicated). Perhaps a bit more explanation of how to submit would help.