Admin: Talk to me! - BloggerHacks
25
May
Right, I think I’ve sorted the template, thanks Pete for the analysis, the wrapper was itself the cause of the problem, and it looks better without it.
More importantly though, to the right (on the front page only) is a recent comments box. This is cool and something I was rather keen on when looking at Wordpress options. But, perhaps more usefully, from the same site, I also found a way to have a ‘comment’ box at the bottom of each post page. It’s even got some formatting and link insertion options. Only works if you’re running javascript enabled browser, but that’s 98% of the readers. I’ve turned off the letter recognition thing to get it to work properly, but it’s pretty cool even with that on; can, um, people test it out and see what they think?
1. Anonymous | May 25th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
I don’t know if you want me to test this comment box, but if so, it seems to work except that if you use Tab to move between fields, the “Find your MP” thing takes the focus… Like the redesign btw.
Posted by Gavin Ayling
2. Anonymous | May 25th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
I do want tests, yes, so thanks, and yes, have found the same problem myself - of course, not everyone uses tab to switch fields, but it’s annoying me, so I’ll fix it, short version is to not display that search box on postpages.
And I’m quite pleased with the redesign, considering I’m entirely self taught, I think I’ve got to the stage that I can fix CSS fairly well. Can’t code from scratch yet, but what I’ve got is good enough. I’ll probably switch it all out and put it as a standard template to download on the new site somewhere.
Posted by MatGB
3. Anonymous | May 25th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Yes, it’s good. I didn’t realise how well blogger could be broken with [sic] to start using WordPress features! WordPress is by far better…
Have you checked your site against the W3C’s validity checkers? They remove some problems that you would have thought were unrelated.
Posted by Gavin Ayling
4. Anonymous | May 25th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Wordpress is good, and I really like some of the sites I’ve seen configured with it, but it needs a MySQL database per domain. The new site has ten subdomains, each has multiple contributors. Blogger allows me both to manage each separately, give admin rights to contributors for just their bit, and allow them to “own” the content.
That, and I don’t trust my web host, so if I switch, all we need to do is republish the blogs, database loss not a problem, Google is backing everything up for me.
Haven’t gone through validators yet, that’s the weekend task, have only now got to the point where I want to test myself, I know bits of it won’t validate because, well, too many blogger hacks and js things, but it’s worth fixing what I can.
Have discovered a problem though; I used to get email notification with “from” details, now everything is from anonymous. Something I can live with I think.
Posted by MatGB
5. Anonymous | May 28th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Yeah, this box works. And thanks for your advice on DK Comment.
For what it is worth, I loathe this redesign. The whole thing looks horribly busy, but my real issue is with the “stepping”.
You have the content box in one colour, then the post box in another and the blockquote in yet another. The lack of padding on the left of your sidebar is also yucky. Too many colours.
Other than that, it’s great… ;-)
DK
Posted by Devil’s Kitchen
6. Anonymous | May 28th, 2006 at 2:00 am
The three colour stepping is for “news” divs, and I actually really dislike them as well. I’m just not that good at redoing them. Padding in the sidebar seems to keep messing up, I’m mising somethign, whenever I do it, the boxes get bigger instead of the text going inside.
TBH, half of the “busy” will go once I switch to the new home, but that’s on hiatus as I’m, um, very very busy at work and too knackered to think it through properly. I’m trialling it on the non-political blog I’m admining now, on the same server, and it’s OK, this is more finished but the basic idea works well.
The sidebar content gets shifted out when I make the switch, as the frontpage gets some of it, my page gets some of it, and the links page gets the rest; advantage of your own server is you can do what you like with the content and not rely on blogger.
I think I’ll dump the grey on the “news” divs completely, do what you and the Hamster do and go for a white background, clean them out completely. But it’s better than it has looked for awhile, and much better than the original default, so I’m happy ish. Couldn’t even read css 6 months ago.
Posted by MatGB