I bit the bullet last night and updated my WordPress install — the first step in a series of upgrades and updates for TT. The site will probably look funny, and things will temporarily be missing or broken, but hopefully nothing will catch fire.
One of my main goals (which may not be accomplished this weekend) is to better integrate the forums and wiki, and I think that that change — like the others I’ll be making — will improve TT’s usefulness for you.
Stay tuned, and as always feedback is welcome.
Update: The theme has been finalized, barring that I wake up tomorrow and realize I’ve made a terrible mistake. Not all of its elements are up and running yet (notably recent comments and access to the categorized post archives), but plenty of them are. Some stuff still looks funny, too.
Thanks for bearing with me — I know how weird it can be when a site you visit regularly undergoes a drastic change like this. I think you’ll be happy with the results, though.
Update 2: More finicky stuff has been dealt with. The main page is nearly at “completed first draft” status. Images still look weird almost everywhere else, archives are still down, the post/comment ad slot is still empty — you get the idea.
I’m off to my weekly gaming night shortly, so I won’t be back on the update wagon until tomorrow morning. At this rate, though, I should have the blog 99% complete tomorrow — then it’s on to integrating the forums and wiki, which I’m really dreading.
I like the look but the rss feed is “broke”
Uff.. I’m sorry Martin, but this is the ugly.
This does indeed look odd 0_0
I hope you intend to change the color scheme. It kinda threw me for a loop when I popped up and BAM this is what I saw.
I’m experimenting with a few different themes to see which one will work best. It’s one thing to see them in preview mode, and another thing entirely to see them with TT content in place — some of them have looked better than I expected, others worse.
Whenever I take a break from tweaking things, I’ll be turning back on the “old” theme. Things will probably still not work entirely correctly (old plugins, new WP install), but it won’t scar your retinas. 😉
This was an attempt to spark intra-party conflict… right? 😉
I like the wider look. 800px is so 2003!
Al: Until Sunday evening, I can pretty much guarantee that things will look like anus. Hopefully steadily less like anus, but still. 😉
Yax: Yeah — installing Google Analytics was a real eye-opener. Users at 800×600 account for less than 2% of TT’s readers, and I’d wager that most of the folks using that resolution aren’t regular visitors. I finally feel comfortable designing for 1024×768+.
Okay, I’m 95% firm on the theme at this point, and I’ve done several hours of work on colors, fonts, placement, menus and other details. There’s still plenty left to go, though!
Everything works for me on the theme, except for the three columns. It makes so much blank space on the right hand side when reading the comments, and it is too much to look at when reading the main article. Your eyes keep getting drawn to the right, but then your line of vision gets broken up by trying to split it against 3 columns.
John: The size of the content column hasn’t changed much, just its location on the screen. Depending on your resolution of choice, I can see how there’d be a lot of white space on the right (and no matter the rez, there’s more to the right than before).
It comes down to personal taste — hopefully after a few days with the new setup, it’ll grow on you!
Its lookin better, but I am gonna have to get used to it.
But keep up the good work Martin, I know I appreciate it, and I am sure others do as well 😀
Thanks, Clayton!
And believe me, I know the feeling. Over the past few months, several of the sites I visit daily have undergone complete overhauls, and every time it took me awhile to get used to them. Some of them, unfortunately, changed for the worse, but most of them changed for the better — including at least one, Something Awful, where I hated the new design at first.
This is already a lot better, I was mostly just poking fun. 🙂