James

By Pentadact

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	Let Tom Francis tell you all what it's like, being male, middle-class and white.

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	So this is the new layout I’ve been tinkering with. There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s very time-consuming tinkering about fancy niceties for which I have long since lost my enthusiasm. The only major thing missing is a box with links to friends’ blogs, but the way I wanted it to work relied on some highly unstable technology that I’m not going to be able to code robustly anytime soon. It involves tachyons. I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later - for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around: Download Comment

	The_B: Oooh. Initial impressions: Very very nice. I like the subtle changes to the visual look, familiar while a lot tider. I shall poke around some more, but consider me updated and a big thumbs up thus far. Jason L: Very nice. Feature requests/bug reports: - It'd be nice if category titles were links to their categories, in addition to the links at the top. I'm pretty sure this is how I got to categories before. - Currently article titlebars don't play nice with wrap on Win32 Firefox 2.0.0.12 - the text pops out above and below the bar. May not be worth fixing. Example 'Two New TF2 Maps...' in a 1100-something pixel window. - This one would take some work - could there be a comments log page at some point? Currently there's no way for non-Pentadacts to tell if other people are saying interesting/infuriating things without going to each article. Super bonus points if it got a separate RSS. Pentadact: Thanks, to both. I now have the motivation to actually attempt to fix the IE problems instead of, say, shooting myself four times in the neck, as was my plan a short while ago. 1. Yeees. This is exactly the sort of thing I like to do, but I didn't know I actually mentioned the Category names anywhere but in the top panel now. Except Links, which I did mean to make a link to the Links link. Link. Will do that. 2. Ah. Funny story - that one story has a different title in the prototype version of James I was using at the time I made this. Pretty funny, I think you'll agree. Ha. My solution to this is just going to be to never, ever write a title that long again. I checked that "I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome" fits without wrap at 1024x768, so I'm taking that as my maximum. 3. That's what I hoped to achieve with the Latest Comment box on the left. If I ever get expandable-panels working, I could make that stretch out to show the five latest or so. Or I could just add an RSS link, which I think is actually incredibly easy. Pentadact: omg fixed. It was one of those problems that looks vast and disastrous but is actually tiny. And it was caused by a piece of code that I have removed THIRTEEN SEPARATE TIMES now. Also, every link in that entire module had reverted to the old URL. It's like time flows backwards for Wordpress, and every change you make eventually just unpings and goes back to the good old days. Pentadact: Okay, version 2.51 now live: Links is now a link to Links, Last Comment is a link to the RSS feed for Comments, as is the new 'Comments' link in the RSS panel. Long title shortened, IE compatibility fixed, and Archives shifted slightly to improve sidebar loading times. The_B: To quote the great Doctor John Zoidberg: "Hurray!" Jason L: Wow! The Flash does games blog design! ImperialCreed: Well done Tom, digging the new tweaked look. One minor quibble, as I write this comment I note that the label 'E-mail' doesn't appear on the same line as the relevant field, instead appearing straight after the 'Name' field on the same line. Anyway, well done. Pentadact: Well spotted. From my permanently-logged-in-as-admin ivory tower, I don't usually see those fields, so I hadn't tested it at every res. ImperialCreed: Verily, I have the eyes of a hawk. In a jar somewhere. Really.

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	Slim Mode
	An unknown php script is randomly causing 15-second chokings of my server's CPU, ultimately hogging so much of its time that my host suspend this entire website for a few minutes. So I've snipped all non-essential elements until I can diagnose it. Apologies if you've encountered one of these CPU Exceeded screens. Believe it or not, what would help most with my diagnosis is lots and lots of people visiting James as often as possible over the next few days. Rolo desserts are also effective.