Three small site changes...
Because I never tire of boring people stupid with little tweaks and quirks around the site, here's an update about three small changes to the way the site is operating:
- Taking my cue from Dan Hon, plasticbag.org's commenting interface has been changed in accordance with the recommendations from Antipixel (that are shortly to be integrated into the default Movable Type templates), which provide a simple, space-friendly and usable alternative to the standard templates I was using. [Spookily this coincides exactly with Paul Mison making the same decisions.]
- While I haven't as yet been totally thorough and systematic in their implementation, I've also had a go at making the site slightly more usable for people with accessibility issues. I have - of course - been using diveintoaccessibility.org as a guide for this process - which I will complete more thoroughly at a later date.
- On the bottom of the individual archive pages of this site you will find a small panel called "BBC: On This Day". This is essentially a piece of meaningless fluff that directs you to the BBC's On This Day entry for whatever day the post was produced. It's far from perfect, and it's not particularly useful as yet, but it's connected to larger ideas I'm having about providing context and timelines for weblog entries. More about that soon, hopefully. In the meantime, if you want to know how the link is generated in Movable Type, the code is here.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
A big improvement on the Comment form Tom... but surely one of the radio buttons should be selected by default? The HTML specs state that sets of buttons should always have one selected and from a UI point of view it also makes sense.
For some reason tabbing from the "Homepage" input field takes me to the "Weblog" link at the top of the page, rather than the next element in the form. I've *no* idea why that is.
→ Posted by: Phil at February 11, 2003 11:43 AM
Oh, and I notice you've got rid of the Preview button. Any particular reason (I'm sure there is!)?
On Pepysdiary.com I changed the templates so that at first there is only the Preview button, no Post, to force people to at least have a brief look at what they're posting. It's dramatically cut down on the number of posts with errors.
→ Posted by: Phil at February 11, 2003 11:44 AM
And another thing Coates! Why does this form not pay any attention to my linebreaks? There should be one after that exclamation mark above.
→ Posted by: Phil at February 11, 2003 11:48 AM
Phew! There's a set of comments to respond to. The tabbing thing might have something to do with my attempt to implement accesskeys, which I will investigate further. You're quite right about the radio buttons, which again I will investigate further. And I reformat the comments to get rid of line breaks because unless you're writing a bloody essay it's more important to me that it's really clear where your comment starts and ends than it is that you get to have line-breaks installed... That one's proving unpopular but I don't care!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 11, 2003 11:52 AM
You know the weird thing about the comments on this thread was that I was literally on my way to turn them off when I saw Phil's explosion of insights. I'd just thought to myself, "Well no one's really going to care about that stuff..."
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 11, 2003 11:57 AM
I noticed the "On this day" feature a couple of weeks ago; think it's a great idea!
→ Posted by: Anna at February 11, 2003 12:10 PM
I've noticed that on the conventional MT comment interface the 'Remember Me' checkbox is always unchecked, even if your details have been remembered. You have to remember to check it each time or else it's going to forget your details when you post a second time. I've been meaning to fix this dumbness using PHP (easier for me than fiddling with Javascript).
→ Posted by: Phil at February 11, 2003 12:38 PM
One major peeve (and I don't know why the MT template doesn't do this by default): you should indicate which fields are required (name and email but NOT URL). Also, when one tries to submit the post without a name, the "Comment Submission Error" page is still in the default MT design.
→ Posted by: megnut at February 11, 2003 3:04 PM
I'm just laughing at the arguements over the comments!
→ Posted by: Casey Bex at February 11, 2003 7:31 PM
Yes - again - you're quite right. I'll work on those straight away. The Content Submission Error Page is a real annoyance that is to do with me having installed MT on my barbelith domain. While every other page works fine, the comments pages seem to demand to use the Barbelith URL. Very upsetting.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 11, 2003 7:55 PM
Tom, v applaud your interest into accessibility. Might you be interested in using your much-visited and highly-linked plastic bag to push the issue a bit?
→ Posted by: David at February 24, 2003 7:30 PM