By Pentadact

Update! Last time I tweaked the design, I supplied a song to play while you stared at it trying to work out what the hell is different. I’ve just added the Mirror’s Edge song to my Mirror’s Edge screenshots post. Could these facts be combined question mark??

Okay, backing slowly away from the precarious construction of toothpicks and Blu-tac that is the James 2.7 source code, I think it’s done. Let me know if something’s malfunctioning wildly for you, I haven’t tested everything.

Since I came up with the last design a year ago, you guys have caused me two equally wonderful problems: more traffic than it was ever built to handle, and so many comments that browser scrollbars shrunk to an unwiedly trifle by comparison. The point of this minor redesign was to deal with those enough that my account would no longer get suspended, and newcomers would be able to work out what the hell was going on. Here’s what’s new – I’ll insert some unrelated images from my Flickr account for those who don’t really care but feel compelled to read.

The defining feature of James removed: Comments are no longer displayed beneath posts on the main page – just the latest one. It had got to the point where even if I limited the main page to two posts, it was a nightmare to find the second one or even know whether there was a second to find. The original idea for this redesign was to embrace that and make it just one post on the main page, but then I thought about it for more than two seconds and realised that’s exactly what you get if you just click on the post. So I went the other way.

Tags! A little box on the right lists them. They’re actually for special series of posts rather than scattershot word-association – almost nothing will have more than one tag, most posts will have none. I wanted a quick way for people who like GTA IV to see what I’ve said about GTA IV, or people who like Trust Me With Your Ears to hear the previous ones, or people stumbling on Fallout Girl to read it from the start.

Last Comments: Tracks the three most recently discussed posts and what was last said about them, which means when old posts get commented, the revival of that discussion can’t be overwhelmed by lots of comments on the latest post. LaZodiac, for example, just responded to a comment made back in November on that Left 4 Dead video. Exciting!

Smoother everything! This is huge. The rounded corners, and my wonky little avatar up there, are very slightly smoother, thanks to being downscaled double-sized GIFs – a cheap and IE6.0 friendly hack for anti-aliasing. Truly, this is the first major sign of the world getting better now that Barack Obama is the leader of the free world.

Nine billion times more efficient: I just deleted about 70% of the existing source code, and replaced it with a more nimble CSS architecture that loads the main column before the sidebars. Getting that to scale correctly at lower resolutions involved forcing ageing HTML to make rough and non-consensual love to underage CSS standards while I watched, aghast. It is not a problem I wish to solve again.

Also: Search bar (Google, but not Google Custom Search because it utterly, utterly sucks), Favourites (only the very best), PC Gamer links (because even PC Gamer US didn’t realise I worked for PC Gamer when they first found this place, and fewer still seem to know who the regular writers are), and a revised About (no room for the headshot anymore, but really the only relevant thing about my appearance is that I’m not female and attractive, so you don’t have to pretend everything I post is interesting).

Again, thanks for coming, thanks particularly for returning, and thanks most of all for commenting so goddamn much.