23 December, 2015 -
Site Response? Good for a Laugh!
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)
Some of the comments about the design of this site have been funny. I've gotten a decent amount of praise from folks over it being utilitarian, simple, to the point and focusing more on content than "gee ain't it neat" artsy-fartsy nonsense... but...
... truly entertaining have been the comments from the "design" side of the community. You know, those who value flash over substance, and think that design is entirely about art and to blazes with concepts like accessibility. I swear, these people have been blowing smoke up their backsides for so long you could win a BBQ competition by chopping them up and serving them in a styrofoam tray.
One of the most unusual of the claims is people saying it looks like something out of the 1990's. REALLY? I can only conclude these people either weren't online in the 1990's or weren't alive for it. Do you see pixel metrics with everything in "Times New Roman"? Do you see square 2px thick borders and oddball paddings thanks to everything being done using tables for layout as we didn't even HAVE CSS at the time... and even the early CSS wasn't real world deployable thanks to Nyetscape 4 lagging behind IE5 so badly. You want to see what the 1990's looked like, load up the default templates for phpBB or Magento!
18 December, 2015 -
MSM Explained, Social Media Like/Share/Plus Added
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)
...and now, auf Wiedersehen.
New Article
It feels weird publishing the article explaining the tagline of this site nearly a week after launch, but as it cross-references the other posts, it kind of had to come after.
The extra time was nice anyways so I could dot all the t's and cross all the i's... or... uhm... wait? eh, whatever.... In any case check it out from the link in the featured section or right here.
Social Media Like/Share/Plus
Finally got the social media plugins for the site added, adding both FaceBook like/Share, as well as Google+. While there are certainly more networks out there, that simply adding these two things added two megabytes and nearly 20 files to the site, multiplying it's size by a factor of 30 or more means that's IT for adding scripting I didn't write to the site. It's just not going to happen given what fat bloated messes those are.
Kind-of sucks such ineptly developed code is basically a "must have" at this point, but since so many sites have it on them at least there's a decent chance of it being cached. They are also nice enough to send it gzipped so it's more like ~500k by that point. It's also not as huge a penalty as the scripts (and the advertising I sorted out some bugs with, get to that in a sec) don't hit you as hard on load time as they are "asynchronous" while the page is loading, and don't fire loading the extra "stuff" until after onload. This means this site loads in half a second, and then it's 2 to 20 seconds for the advert, social media and disqus comments areas to load.
6 December, 2015 -
Breakfast... Dinner... Launch
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)
I said lunch, not LAUNCH?!?
It truly feels like I'm hitting the launch button a bit prematurely, but it's the only way to test things like Disqus and social media functionality. Most of the content I wanted up and ready to go at launch is in place, though there is still a great deal I'll be adding in the coming weeks.
On the agenda, in no real order:
FAQ
Hard to do that before people ask questions.
Forums
This might take a while since my previous weapon of choice, SMF, has gone and shit its own bed by using jQuery.
I'm arguing with myself over looking elsewhere, or making a custom skin that may or may not be compatible with future versions of SMF. Maybe I'll give myBB a second look, though its template system - like most "what do you mean PHP is already a templating system" crap makes me want to introduce my metacarpus to someone's oral cavity with significant velocity.
