New Style Sheet – Nice But Broken?

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We’ve had some feedback on the Synthtopia site update.

Things like “I love the new site! But it’s kind of ugly!”

Andy says, “I often view your site on my iPhone and the mobile style sheet was perfect. Now however when I access via my phone I just get the main site, which doesnt display well at all.”

This is fixed for mobile phones. We’re still planning improvements for iPad surfing.

xtopher says “You need to add some padding to the content column. All the text jams up against the edges of the cell/table and looks pretty crappy.” Torley went so far as emailing a nice screen shot of the site looking all jammed up.

You’ll be happy to note that the main content of the site now comes with more padding than ever! And no, we’re not talking about all the synth porn stories.

Thanks for the feedback! Keep it coming!

20 thoughts on “New Style Sheet – Nice But Broken?

  1. Looks great now! (On Safari 5.1) Text is very readable again. Also, the icons on the upper right of comments no longer overlap the text. And fwiw, thanks for keeping the main content as black text on white background.

  2. In the year and half that I discovered this blog and have been throughly reading it as one of my top sites. I must say, I’m happy with the changes, and hope to see things continue to grow as much as they have.

  3. Noticed the improvements are ongoing and it’s looking much better than a week or two ago. Can’t wait till the iPad viewing is fixed (content from side columns is displayed below the main page content instead of along side it.) Thanks for all the hard work.

  4. Just viewing on iPad, avatar icons in comments need some padding-left.
    Site header image (word Synthtopia and synth image) is ugly and so 90s-ish. If you want some help with design feel free to contact me.

    1. MirlitronOne

      You know that I actually agonized over getting rid of the IntenseDebate comment system, specifically because you were one of the undisputed comment Kudo kings and we hate to antagonize the people that actually like our site and take time to comment.

      So – I asked WWMD? (what would MirlitronOne do) and decided the IntenseDebate system had to go.

      IntenseDebate has some big problems that their tech support never really has dealt with.

      The biggest issue was duplicate comments. We’ve got some posts where it put in 4 or 5 copies of the same comment.

      IntenseDebate was also always telling you that there were 5 comments on a post and then you’d look at the post and there’d be 3 comments. You didn’t mention it much, but I know you were wondering where those other 2 comments went.

      IntenseDebate also made it harder to deal with spam.

      We’ve had 49,588 spam comments blocked so far in Sept, so the problem is pretty serious. I work hard to make sure that spam is blocked and legitimate comments get through, and the IntenseDebate system made this more difficult.

      This meant that there would be an witty MirlitronOne comment, followed by something about “cheap seo services check it out” or “increase your google position today”.

      You can be sure that “Kudos for MirlitronOne” is on my “to do” list. Along with fixing the iPad cack-ups, the default comment wrapping and multiple other things.

      1. Aaah, you know I love this blog really, and I’m a bigger man than mere kudos points. Much bigger. Much, much, bigger. Huge. And I do appreciate the IntenseDebate “features” (ahem) problem. Have no fear, I will carry on irritating you all for a while, as long as I am able. However, the doctors say that I have moved up the operations list, and I may not be Mabel much longer.

  5. I love this blog, but in all honesty, I don’t come here expecting any kind of nice design. Each of the side columns is cluttered with stuff that I never look at. The big tag cloud on the left seems redundant when there is a listing of all the topics above it. I’d much rather see a layout with one big column for the content and a slightly wider side column for whatever you need to put there (maybe a few less ads?).

    Anyway, I’ll keep coming here regardless of all that, but the one thing I wish you’d fix is using the newer YouTube embeddable player. In the Chrome browser, every time I’m scrolling and my cursor goes over one of the embeds, it disables the scrolling. I know this might be some funky Chrome browser issue, but pretty much every other site I visit uses the newer embedded player which doesn’t have this problem. That is my one request! Thanks.

  6. great to see you guys taking the readers feedback on board! the site is looking great and i see the mobile style sheet is back. toilet surfing at work is back again! 🙂

  7. reduce the line spacing a little bit. get rid of the “bold” text for the left side links. reduce the cloud presence or get rid of it.

    good job keeping text size nice and big and readable!

    1. Line spacing – somebody else asked for us to increase the line spacing. Any concensus on this?

      Bold text on the left – I will experiment with styling that differently. I needs to be readable and noticeable, but not the wall of blue links that we used to have.

      The cloud is big and hideous. Some people do use it, though, so I’ll probably try working on the style of it first.

    1. We moved the feed as part of a site overhaul two weeks ago.

      We put an RSS redirect on the old feed, as specified in the RSS specification and we put up a post to bring this to people’s attention:

      https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2011/09/17/patching-in-process-rss-feed-updated/

      If your feed reader isn’t recognizing this, just add this URL:

      https://www.synthtopia.com/feed/

      Sorry about the inconvenience. Let us know if you have any other feedback!

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