Update: dooce® v6 status
November 21st, 2007
For dooce readers, I just wanted to let you know that we’ve done a bunch of edits to the backend and code and such. Empty your cache and refresh refresh refresh.
Fixed:
Feeds. Old subscriptions should work now. They still don’t include the photos yet. We ran into a time killing and soul deadening bug somewhere that won’t allow us to include the photos without destroying the line breaks in the feed. This is a big one for us to fix. For now, though the feed works.
CSS/visuals.
Tightened up the comments forms (they still need some work) and made them less ganky when an error is present or when previewing.
Killed the ordered list numbering on comments as it reset on each page. Drupal’s max comments per page default is 300. Yeah, so that’s not gonna work here. We are looking into links for each comment as well as a numbering scheme that works across all browsers (Hey, upgrade your browsers people. IE 6 is DEAD. It’s a six year old browser. GET OVER IT.)
Also fixed some of the horsey small fonts (looking at you Firefox) and sidebar stuff.
Added:
Previous and Next to blog posts. Heather and I debated the functionality of this one for a long time. On the old site, it was generally by category, but if you landed in a cross-categorized post, the previous and next picked the first or main category and you went forward and backward through the archives of that category. How it works now is that on each photo section (Chuck, Daily, Style) you’ll move through each of those, but not across them. If I look at today’s Chuck picture, the previous photo and previous links take me backwards through the Daily Chuck pics. Same for Daily Style and Daily Photo. The previous and next work in those sections. However, for general posts, the previous and next take you through the entire archive, including old Daily Photos that were posted on the old site. We hope that you find this an agreeable way to get through the archives. Many of you made this request here and in the comments thread on dooce. It is live now. Enjoy!
Special thanks go out to Bill for busting the code and styling for the previous and next navigation early this morning.
Looking forward to the holiday wherein I sleep a lot. o
Jon, have you tried Camino? (www.caminobrowser.org) It doesn’t have Firefox’s add-on architecture, but it’s a Mac-specific Mozilla browser and I find it to be zippier.
Jon,
Thanks for keeping Next/Previous. It really helps out when catching up. I found Dooce about 8 months ago and in my spare time I’m working my why through the entire archive. Her writing is to good to miss even a morsel.
Kudos on the port. That is huge. I’m a web developer for a Large Software Company (think bigger than MS). I feel your pain. This was a big accomplishment. Ping me if you ever need any testing help. I’d enjoy helping you out.
Does dooce still offer feeds with images? I can’t see anything other that text in the current main_feed.
@Daniel, I’m going to invite you to read the second paragraph again. If it is still not clear, and it may not be because I wrote this under heavy sedation, we are working on it. There have been some server issues unrelated to the redesign and CMS switch that may or may not be causing the reason why we haven’t been able to get our feed solution working.
The newer feed (click the link at the bottom of dooce.com) does have the photo title linked in the feed, but not the actual photo. We’ll likely only be providing the thumbnail in the feed, as the images are pretty hefty for a feed reader.
@everybody: if you want just dooce links go here:
http://www.dooce.com/topic/links/
All the categories work like this, just hit the popup menu in the footer.
The site looks great, very nicely done. Very user friendly and clean. I can just imagine the amount of work that went into it. (which is why my site always looked like crap and dooce looks so damn good. I am not down with the work it takes to pull that off.)
Kudos!
Hey Jon,
Superb work all round on the new-look Dooce - just want to say that I don’t totally agree with the “IE6 is DEAD” thing, I work in a web team for a university and we’ve all had IE7 forced upon us (on XP). And, for IE, we all pretty much wish we could go back to IE6. IE7 tends to flake out in XP, particularly when hitting Java applets (I’m told its better under Vista). It could just be a compatability thing (old version of Java) but it doesn’t give you much confidence. We still have a fair share of our audience using IE6 too, and we try and keep our site open to as many browsers as possible. Just my two cents.
So, blurbomat is next, right?
Enjoy your holiday - you’ve definitely earned it!
Happy Thanksgiving to the BlurboDoocery!
Hey Jon. FYI: I added “www.dooce.com” to Google Reader, and it subscribed to the comments RSS, rather than the post feed. The atom.xml didn’t seem to be updating. http://dooce.com/feed_main/feed works fine, btw.
hey, since i can’t comment on dooce i thought i would let you know here, I still have to use Ctrl refresh every time I want to see new content, posts or the daily photos. I’m sure if I have to do it, so do lots of others.
@rosemary, what browser and OS are you having this difficulty with? Firefox can be particularly reliant on the cache, as can Safari. If you are still having to do this, have you tried emptying your cache?
It is Firefox, and I have emptied it a few days ago. I will try again and let you know what happens after another post.
I’m sure you’ve gotten about a billion emails about this, but I thought I’d let you know that the daily photo/chuck/style are not updating on the main page, but do update from the chuck page. If that makes any sense at all ….
@jami, I haven’t gotten any emails that say that. I’d empty your cache a few times and try a few control or shift refreshes. Sorry to hear this.
Yup that worked…Ignore me!
Still have to control refresh, It’s the same as what jami said also(except I don’t see new posts either), on the main page the thumbs aren’t new, but if I click on one to get to the photo page, then the thumbs for the current photos are updated there. I bet it is the cache, and the sub pages aren’t being cached, while the main is. If i empty mine everything will work perfectly with new content, until once again something new is added then I have to refresh or do it over again. Sorry to be causing you so much grief, just thought you would like to know
@rosemary, I’ve tweaked some of the cache settings on the server. Hit shift-refresh. See what happens. This shouldn’t keep plaguing you if you’ve emptied your cache a few times. Firefox can be particularly obstinate in this regard. It’s still a better browser than most other offerings. I said most.
Also, try hitting just dooce.com as in: http://dooce.com . Hope this helps and sorry for the issues.