• Mark (unregistered) in reply to Alex Papadimoulis

    2007-01-06 21:39 • by Alex Papadimoulis:

    I can take a crack at putting a "Display Full Articles" checkbox on the home page that remembers it's preference via a cookie.

    Would anyone want that?

    Yeup, that'd work for me. Like other folks have said, I'm not a fan of the click-throughs. I'm here most every day and want to just sit and read through the articles that I haven't seen.

    How about a cookie tracking the "last seen article" and then show everything newer than that expanded, everything older than that compressed?

  • Drew K (unregistered)

    Alex, chipping in my $0.02 worth of preferences.

    • Expand the most recent article on the home page, leave all older articles summarized. The most recent article therefore doesn't need the "full article" link.

    • All article summaries (and the full most-recent article) have a link to the comments.

    • The comments page shows the full article in a div, which gets hidden via javascript. This way users with JS disabled still get the article, everyone else has the option to expand it (like it has right now).

    Nice to have:

    • Comments page doesn't have Next/Prev unless there actually are Next/Prev pages to go to. (Currently the words show up, but are not link.)

    • Don't auto-fill the subject line on replies to the main article. You end up with nearly all of the comments having the same subject line. If top-level replies had to choose a subject line, then replies to those would be easier to identify.

    • Have an option to show all comments on one page. If that would kill your ad rates, you could put in a Google ad after every $x comments.

  • Bernhard Hofmann (unregistered)

    WAY better. The articles load much more quickly, but with the same trusty layout.

    Well done.

  • JohnB (unregistered) in reply to Alex Papadimoulis

    At work, I have to use IE; at home it's Opera. TDWTF page rendering before in IE was glacial; in Opera it was tolerable. Now it's less glacial in IE and snaps up almost immediately in Opera.

    No ... I don't use Firefox

    Captcha: foxtrot

  • Jack (unregistered)
  • Steve (unregistered)

    Looks much better!

    Can't say I'm a fan of BBCode... but... oh well.

  • KattMan (unregistered)

    Alex, You may not read this far down and see this post, nor will I probably be back and find my own post to see any response if you do, but I have to say, this site is loading a lot faster. Some things seem visually off, but you are still working on it.

    My only issue is my sign in doesn't seem to be working, but that might just be me.

    Good job so far.

    Captcha = Tango (and Cash)

  • Grim (unregistered) in reply to J Random Stranger

    Oy.

    http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http%3a%2f%2fthedailywtf.com%2f

  • WTF in WTF? (unregistered)

    great, now you can also make your own entries in the WTF's. For instance, can you explain why wherever I click on the Articles sections it always say Pop-up Potpourry Series?

    captcha:null, I hope that's not where my msg is going to

  • Liz (unregistered)

    thanks for adding the full text cookie :)

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Alex, You may not read this far down and see this post

    To all: I'm reading every comment on this article -- feel free to contact me as well (via contact form) if you'd like too. I'm always open to suggestions.

  • Wladimir Palant (unregistered)

    Alex, can we have a link to the comments page in the feed? Right now it only has a link to the article itself so I have to load the article that I just read again to get to the comments.

  • (cs)

    Another idea ("nice to have" category): I noticed that the title bar of the CodeSOD articles have a different color. How about going further down that route and giving each series (Daily, Internal, Pop-up Potpourri, Smorgasbord, etc) its own colour?

  • Craig (unregistered)

    I hate blogs with click throughs to read the blog posts. Put a reasonable length on the number of posts on the front page and kill the click through.

  • ChristofferC (unregistered)

    For some reason visiting this site makes Konqueror crash hard for me.

  • M (unregistered)

    i hope you fix the CSS loading. Right now, CSS does not load in Firefox (1.5), and the site looks like ass :(

  • M (unregistered)

    Quick follow-up on Firefox not loading the CSS: When i browse directly to the CSS file, Firefox sends it off to the Quicktime plugin, of all things.

    Are people still stuck in that "We build stuff in IE and then test in your nerdy lil browsers later" rut that went out with the dinosaurs?

  • unknown (unregistered) in reply to M
    M:
    i hope you fix the CSS loading. Right now, CSS does not load in Firefox (1.5), and the site looks like ass :(

    No problems here, using Firefox 2.0. Either you have totally messed up your local configuration, or then firefox 1.5 is broken and you need to update. I'd suspect the former. Pls do not blame the webmaster if you can't use a browser.

  • (cs)

    You could do with running the pages through W3C's XHTML validator.

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fthedailywtf.com%2F

    and here's the general link:

    http://validator.w3.org

    Your home page currently reports 20 validation errors, and the comment pages reporting in the order of 200+ errors.

    If you can, try to make it validate with XHTML 1.1 STRICT, by changing you HTML doctype. I think there's an option to do this from the ASP.NET GUI.

    Having a valid XHTML document will give you a number of advantages:

    1. Greater compatibilty in with a broader range of web browsers, including text only browsers.
    2. Improved search engine ranking.
    3. Much better compatibility with screen-readers, and other accessibility tools that people with disabilities (visual impairment commonly) often use.

    If you care about web accessibility then check out the following link:

    http://www.w3.org/WAI/

    It's worth caring about, as some sites (more commerical sites usually) have had court cases lodged against them, on the grounds of discimination!

  • (cs)

    • Show the full article by default.

    • Make he number of aricles per page as user-setting, with a default of 5. Then have simple next and back links to page x articles forwards or backwards.

  • Chris Smith (unregistered) in reply to Alex Papadimoulis

    YES!

  • Martin (unregistered)

    I couldn't complain about the old version. Now, you are using .NET and therefore the pages take considerable longer to download. Good idea, bad technology...

  • (cs)

    When I first saw this, it took me a while to find the "Full Article" link. Now that someone thought the short intro was the entire article (see Fudge Factory comments), I'm pretty sure the link is nowhere nearly as visible as it should be. Ideally it would hang at the end of the post, like so. Full article...

  • Martin (unregistered)

    Nice redesign. One nitpick:

    Your RSS feed at http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf is broken. It doesn't properly escape HTML. RSS has a <description> element, which is supposed to contain escaped HTML (at least that's what everyone does ...). Your feed escapes the HTML, but one time too few, e.g. in the Making Time for Unix article, there is code like: if ($foo < 5) The "<" is represented by a "<" in the <description> element, but it needs to be escaped twice, it should be "&lt;", so that it doesn't get mixed up with the HTML around it. <p>if ($foo &lt; 5) ...</p>

  • (cs) in reply to wgh

    Someone else already pointed out the errors of the main page in the W3C validator.

    Here's what it shows for the Side Bar, which, as a consequence of the errors, doesn't even load in Mozilla 1.7.13:

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fforums.thedailywtf.com%2Fforums%2F18%2FShowForum.aspx

  • munkay (unregistered)

    considerably faster for sure. maybe i'm missing something, but what features are you missing from a regular ol' blog like wordpress/movabletype/etc that would require you to write your own? seems things like rss/categories/comments are already well taken care of by those, and are a work in progress here.

    just my 0.02$.

  • FuBar Revisited (unregistered)

    Dude - you need to add some AJAX to your application. The page loads sit there and think for 3 seconds, and then load the articles.

    Community Server isn't nearly that lame.

    Give yourself a WTF

  • Brandon Matthews (unregistered)

    This site is much cleaner and efficient. Kudos Alex!

  • Russ (unregistered)

    Very nice update. Exactly what bugged me about the old site is gone.

  • Gandalf the Grey (unregistered)

    <sarcasm>Instead of using the BLINK tag, use a MARQUEE. It will stand out, and it will also be lots of fun chasing it across the screen to chase it.</sarcasm>

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