dotCommonweal 1.5
Incoming: very early Thursday morning, dotCommonweal (but not the main site) will be down for about two hours while our Web developers install several upgrades, most of which are behind-the-scenes improvements. Here’s how the user interface will change come Thursday: First–are you sitting down, Stuart?–the comboxes will now support standard HTML tags. That means you can add itals, boldface, blockquotes, etc. to your heart’s content–provided you know the code. Second, we’re adding a “Recent Posts” list to the righthand column, just under the contributors list, so you can save your scrolling energy for other, less brilliantly designed sites after you’ve read everything here. Third, you can now subscribe to the comments, as distinct from the blog posts, so you can more easily keep tabs on your favorite (and not-so-favorite) conversations. Fourth, you’ll be able to search blog content via the handy search box just above the contributors list. Fifth, and finally, when you navigate away from the blog home page to individual posts, you’ll see previous- and next-post links at the top of the page. Less clicking all around. (Why not use one of your extra clicks to take advantage of our Christmas gift-subscription offer? Give one gift subscription and get one free!) There may be some growing pains, but we trust you’ll let us know if you encounter any technical difficulties.
This is great news!
Finally, catching up with the late 1990s! :)
Are you taking suggestions for more changes? There are two that would save me a lot of scrolling time.
The first would be a change in the location of the post author’s name, from the end to the beginning of the post. Especially on long posts, I find myself scrolling down to see who wrote it, then scrolling up to read the article.
Second, adding the “previous” and “next” tabs on the individual posts will be nice. But I’d also appreciate the site remembering what post I was viewing, and returning me to that point in the page rather than defaulting to the top every time.
Also, just FYI, I’m getting the following message at the bottom of the page:
Warning: Unknown(): Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively. in Unknown on line 0
Thanks for your suggestions, Gina–keep them coming! As you can see, we have moved by-lines to the top of posts. (That was in the works, I just didn’t think it was worth mentioning as a “feature.”) I like your idea about the back memory in the browser and we’ll look into it.
[...] we made the big switch to dotCommonweal 1.5–apparently without a major hitch. We’ve already addressed a handful of minor problems, [...]
For those of you who, like me, don’t even know what an “HTML tag” is, but want to learn, I just found a helpful website: http://austen.com/tutorial/#center
The one Grant mentioned earlier is also good: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp