solarbird | Entries tagged with webpage

So for the longest time, the comments count on the blog page have been totally wrong. A post could have 30 or 40 notes (comments, likes, etc) of various kinds and show up as zero or one comment in both archives and latest-post (“Blog”) views. The correct number would never appear.

For example, the two pictures I posted of George today showed up as zero notes combined; the real number was 14, mostly likes. But if you went to the post view or went directly to the individual post, you’d see everything.

There are reasons for this, having to do with custom comment types and echoing posts around and stuff. I’ve tried to fix it before, to hilarious failure sound effects, but now? I FINALLY HAVE IT YEEEEEEEEEEEEES :D

It still doesn’t count linked comments, which means comments on places like Livejournal and Dreamwidth aren’t included, but those are only linked-to comments anyway, so that’s fair.

Damn, this place has felt inappropriately lonely from the Blog view for a long, long time. Talk about discouraging new people from interacting!

Oh, hey, also – I have a mobile theme (Carrington) that kicks in on small devices. Mobile users, are you okay with that thing? It’s incredibly hard to customise so I haven’t. I could turn it off entirely, and you’d get the desktop view on your phone, but that’s… not super-optimal either. Any thoughts? (She asked on a Friday afternoon, when nobody reads anything… XD )

(I will say this for Carrington: it has counted comments correctly the whole time. So there, WordPress! XD )

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: ??? | something we heard at Festival du Bois, in my head.

I've had a hoarse and horky weekend, thanks to forgetting my seasonal allergy meds on Friday - I must be the only serious supervillain who can be laid low by forgetting her antihistamines^* - and I'm pretty much thinking I want this retail therapy:

...on the T-shirt. I mean, honestly, the band name comes from the opening credits of this show. Well, of the show they're parodying, The Powerpuff Girls. Who are they protecting Townsville from? Crime, and the Forces! Of! Evil! How can I not? XD

But I also have way too many T-shirts. I collect them for concert-wear, in form-fitting sizes (usually small), so I can show up on stage with a Fire Ferrets/Republic City T and things like that. It's fun. :D

But I do have an awful lot of them at this point.

Maybe I should get this one larger. It'll probably shrink. Now, where did I put that Chemical X...

*: You know what'd be funny? If Poison Ivy^** had pollen allergies.
**: Strangely, I am not allergic to poison ivy. Or Poison Ivy, for that matter. But she's got a girlfriend.

ps: I did a bunch more work on the website over the weekend. Little things. Did you know the albums on the blog can play while you're reading the blog? Check it. :D And if you see any bugs, let me know!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Poison Ivy | The Coasters

You guys found three bugs! One of which is in Bandcamp’s code, and I’ve forwarded it to them, the other two were in my code and are fixed! The funniest one was probably ‘administrator comments on posts are rendered in black on black and thus invisible.’ Some might say that’s for the best, but I fixed it anyway. XD

You guys who found bugs want Minion buttons? Email me where to send them. :D

Anyway, I did another round of tightening up and such last night, particularly on the Music page, which is hosted over at Bandcamp – I have less control, but not zero. In addition to the bug fixes above, here are the latest changes:

Music page borders now look like rest of website
Music and Blog pages now both have candy buttons in the banner like the rest of the website
Music and Blog page identifiers and menu placement are now consistent with rest of site (moreso on some browsers than others, because of reasons)
Blog page banner no longer a .gif (had been because legacy reasons), now same .jpg as rest of site
Minor element positioning improvements in blog

We should be pretty stable now for a while. If you see anything else, please let me know – thanks!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Down to South Australia | (reply in my head from folklife)

The band website has been kind of a mess for a while, partly because I kept adding things in weird places that I thought might work but didn’t, and partly because it has always been an assemblage of parts. The blog is a locally hosted WordPress, the video page was just my YouTube channel, the music page was at least partially integrated but is still really Bandcamp – things like that.

Basically, it was a mess, and entirely out of hand. And I read an article a few weeks ago on focus of presentation on your main band page, and decided to do something about it. It’s not so much a redesign – because it isn’t – as a better and more complete implementation of the existing design.

Originally, I just wanted to fix the front page. But then YouTube threw its new page format at me, and that doesn’t work with what I do. And one of my blog readers told me they turned off stylesheets to read my blog(!) because they simply can’t read white on black, and I’ve heard people say they had trouble with that before, and it all kind of snowballed.

So I pulled a couple of style elements from the blog and brought them over (particularly in the left bar), and hammered the other parts of the blog into looking like the rest of the site, made a videos page that’s not on YouTube, updated just about everything for consistency, and, well, take a look at it, will you? Does it render reasonably on your machine?

One big advantage of the new blog format is that I can post wider pictures without breaking the columns. Yay!

I’ve tested it on a couple of browsers and it’s fine so far, but I don’t have every browser or OS. From here, it looks a lot more consistent and frankly less goofy a presentation, but it’s still new code and parts of it could be broken.

And I’m still not sure what to do on phones. On phones, WordPress flips over to Carrington, which is a mobile-specific standard format, which is a a lot easier to read but… not attractive. Also I don’t know how to get the social-candy-icons stuff to show up over the banner on the blog page, because WordPress. I do know how to get them to show up on the Music page. I haven’t done it yet, but will – it’ll be tedious, and can wait until after Folklife is over.

Anyway, give it a look, if you get a chance. Does it work on your machine?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!