This Dang Website II: The Dang-ening

By Shamus Posted Monday Jul 9, 2012

Filed under: Notices 135 comments

Sorry for the lack of content. I’m making small changes to the site here and there, based on feedback. There’s more work to be done. I’m taking cues from a few suggestions, and from the approach James Lileks uses to wrangle his content. (Seriously. He was doing his thing for about six years before I got started, and he’s even more prolific than I am. (Although he’s somewhat held in check by his need to go back and fuss & reformat old stuff. (Not that I have any room to talk.)) There is a huge mountain of content there, and if nostalgia artifacts, retro-curiosities, and loving mockery of the past is your thing, there’s enough there to keep you entertained for months.)

I seem to have ruined the preceding paragraph with parenthetical shenanigans. Let me start again: I’m working on the website. It’s boring. So no content. Sorry. Almost done.

As some have suggested, Spoiler Warning, Comics, and Programming posts will be getting their own index. The Spoiler Warning one is done already. I’ll be adding some kinda promotion for the book, somewhere. We’ll see.

More feedback is welcome. The previous feedback made for some dang fine improvements.

 


From The Archives:
 

135 thoughts on “This Dang Website II: The Dang-ening

  1. Jjkaybomb says:

    Didn’t expect nor want flowers everywhere in an explosion of crazy, but stuff seems to have gotten a lot less interesting without the little buttons at the top… And is the stuff in the blue bar under the logo an autofont? It’s hard to read.

    Is this design easier for mobiles or something? NVM I’ll go trawl through the comments on the last section….

    1. noahpocalypse says:

      I concur- it feels empty like this. I really liked all those pictures that divided up the posts. They made it feel like something was here other than ads, links, and blue lines.

      1. Jjkaybomb says:

        Rather reply than edit my original message, it just feels like everything got a whole lot more cold and distant. There’s nothing to invite you in and explore. Just a little understated drop-down menu with a bunch of meaningless words on it.

        1. Paul Spooner says:

          There you have it Shamus. We will never be satisfied until you add a “throw some clothes on the floor, knock the pictures a little crooked, and leave the legos out for everyone to step on in the middle of the night” button which makes this blog look (and smell) for each person just like their old bedroom from when they were kids.

          That should be easy to code! I hear you can do it with some Emacs and JavaScript.

    2. Primogenitor says:

      Until you mentioned it, I didn’t notice they were gone. Guess I was mentally filtering them out with the adverts and header-bar. No loss to me *shrug*.

      1. harborpirate says:

        Same here, anything in that section was essentially invisible to me. Banner blindness, I guess?

        What I did notice was how much less cluttered the site looks now.

    3. newdarkcloud says:

      I disagree. I think the icons being delegated to a sidebar is a lot cleaner. Where the top looked cluttered before it now looks much better and space is more efficiently used.

      Plus, now you can click on one of them and not have to hover over it before you know what it means.

      1. Bryan says:

        Except, they’re not “relegated to a sidebar”. They’re gone entirely. Both the line of images at the top of the /twentysidedtale/ page, and the images on every individual post, are gone entirely; the former are not present anywhere that I can see (except in the dropdown), and the latter are replaced by text.

        This does indeed make the whole site seem a bit colder.

        Not that I mind too much, since I can still find all the category links in the dropdown (and its missing form submit button, so a mis-click ends up autosubmitting the form via javascript, hooray), but I’ve been reading this for quite a while now, as well.

        1. Dragomok says:

          I miss images at the top of articles too.

      2. Klay F. says:

        While I’d agree with you, inasmuch as I like websites to look clean, I have to disagree that it looks better here.

        The new design looks… sterile, I guess is the word. The only place where sterility is a good thing is a surgeon’s operating room.

    4. Zak McKracken says:

      My assumption was that shamus removed the symbols from the top bar and some other elements but is working on adding other elements that will work better to fuilfill the same purpose.

      Regarding the visual impression: I don’t mind at all. There’s probably enough stuff that needs to be represented to add quite a few things, but if there wasn’t, I’d like it to stay this way. Much less distracting.

      1. Syal says:

        Part of the purpose was decoration, though.

        And I don’t remember an ad being at the top of the page before; those old buttons worked as a nice colorful dividing line between ads and content. I’d like to see them come back.

        (Not necessarily as links, as I never used them for getting around.)

    5. X2Eliah says:

      Imo that’s just the instictive response to the “this is new? boooooo we want no changes!!” feeling all humans have.

      For what it’s worth, I dig the new look.
      If there needs to be more colour, well, put some blinking flashing shaking “cograts you are the 99th visitor, click for prize” flash adverts, sure.

  2. hewhosaysfish says:

    Time for me to start complaining!

    I had a look at the new “New Here?” link at the top and saw a few odd/missing things. Maybe someone else will have noticed these things in the 218+ comments attached to the previous post… but there are 218 of them so I’m certainly not reading them to check:

    Are the heading “Most Popular” and the sub-heading “Autoblography” supposed to be inside the greey box with the others? Is the grey box actually supposed to be 3 grey boxes for “Most Popular”, “Personal Favourites” and “Webcomics”? Seems to me like some tags have been misplaced.

    Is DM of the Rings meant to be mentioned twice? I can see why it would be in both “Most Popular” and “Webcomics” (given that it is both very popular and a webcomics) but it still struck me as odd.

    Why no mention of Spoiler Warning? It’s dozens (hundreds? I might go count it) of hours of video content and it’s still active, being updated several times a week (when not on hiatus between seasons).

    1. krellen says:

      The “box on/box off” inconsistency on the page looks a bit sloppy. Either all the comments on what the various articles are should be in the boxes, or none of them should be (notably missing boxes is the first part of the “Most Popular” section).

      You are also missing italics/emphasis on your explanatory comment under the “Webcomic” header – another consistency issue.

  3. Tuck says:

    Looking good!

    There’s a formattingg error on the “New Here?” post, the section titled “The Autoblography” isn’t closed.

  4. Vincent says:

    Well, the site *could* use more Shogun 2 posts. :)

    1. Wilcroft says:

      ^This. It’s been almost two months since the last one!

      1. Josh says:

        These will be returning at some point. Sorry it’s been taking so long, I’ve been busy moving (which is also why we haven’t started another season of Spoiler Warning yet). Hopefully by the beginning of August everything will be sorted out and I’ll be able to get back to working on my Shogun 2 stuff.

        1. Piflik says:

          Wait…so it is till august that I have to wait for my next Spoiler Warning fix? Damn you, real life!

          1. Peter H. Coffin says:

            There’s always the now-handily-linked-to archives. Go watch Fallout 3 again or something. *grin*

            1. Josh says:

              Spoiler Warning will hopefully return sooner. We’re planning on recording this Sunday.

              1. newdarkcloud says:

                We hope you start soon. We love the show and are sick of holding back all the bile we have for ME3. There’s some good stuff too, but mostly bile.

            2. SougoXIII says:

              I did damn it! I have re-watch the Fallout 3 season 3 times in the last 2 weeks. The withdrawal symptoms never goes away!

              1. newdarkcloud says:

                I’m glad I’m not the only person who does that.

  5. nmichaels says:

    An observation: from this page, it’s hard to get to the previous dang website post.

    1. Thomas says:

      The ‘previous’ links at the bottom of the article to ‘This Dang Website’ has always been there and is still there right?

  6. Deadyawn says:

    Yeah, it’s alright near as I can tell. I haven’t really looked around that much though.

    Gotta say though, I did like the look of the spoiler warning page before even if that was just preferential.(Also, as an aside, you haven’t updated the last few episodes for the last two seasons. It’s been bugging me a little)

  7. AJ_Wings says:

    I kinda liked the icons at the top of the website. Made things easier to access content and added a bit of personality to the website.

  8. Kdansky says:

    Nope, 600 pixel max width still murders mobiles:

    http://www.wuala.com/Kdansky/Shared/Screenshot_2012-07-09-15-32-34.png/

    I do like the general reduction of stuff a lot though. You could take a look at how Rockpapershotgun does it, because that site works just fine, and has also a fixed width main column (which isn’t quite as ridiculously narrow though). And yes, I won’t stop harping on that.

    1. Shamus says:

      That’s not the 600px width doing that. The ad itself is only 500 or so, and the text is even narrower than that. The text looks to be 300 pixels wide in that shot.

      I don’t even know how to go about fixing this. The problem doesn’t happen on the smartphone I’ve got here. It doesn’t happen on Chrome, IE, or Firefox. I just… I am stumped.

      1. Rick C says:

        It’s probably Opera doing that.

        Edit: Looks fine in Chrome for Android, too.

        1. Zak McKracken says:

          I’m using Opera on a desktop, and after doing ctrl+F11 (fit to width), it ignores the 600px setting and just makes it narrower. I can go down to 281 pixels width before the design breaks and I get a text-only version.

          So the fixed width shouldn’t be the problem. Maybe there’s an automatically generated mobile version of the site that wordpress sends to opera mobile?
          I once had that problem with another site that insisted on serving the horribly mutilated mobile version to Opera, including on the desktop…

          1. Rick C says:

            I read somewhere that Opera mobile routes web sites through Opera’s proxies, where they somehow mobilify sites. That could well be what’s doing it.

      2. Kronopath says:

        I seem to remember something about Opera Mobile auto-sizing text to the width of the screen. This may be what’s going on. Maybe?

        1. Pete says:

          It does, but it seems to work fine on my phone (opera on an android with a relatively small screen). It did look wonky while loading though so maybe thats the issue? Ive had opera constantly cease loading webpages on me before… Or I just got lucky.

      3. Eruanno says:

        It doesn’t look too shabby on an iPhone.

        http://i.imgur.com/zwUWY.png
        or
        http://i.imgur.com/9znAY.png

      4. CTrees! says:

        Works fine on my Droid 2.

        I hate to imply you should ignore most mobile problems, but… Different phones behave differently enough that it’s almost like trying to program for different browsers entirely. For instance, d20pfsrd.org? On my phone, I can’t resize any of the pages (though I can everywhere else that’s not using a mobile theme). I even talked with one of the guys who coded the darn page, and apparently they tested on quite a lot of different smartphones – it’s just an oddity of the droid 2, apparently.

        So really what I’m saying is, worrying about it looking perfect on every different type of Android phone is a lot like worrying that it looks perfect on Konqueror and the Opera variant that came out on a cartridge for the Nintendo DS – it’s a nice thought, but the effort-to-utility ratio is way off.

        Sorry Kdansky.

    2. Deadfast says:

      It displays fine (same as it does on desktop) for me in both landscape and portrait in Opera Mobile 12.

      The ad doesn’t display though and I haven’t done anything to prevent it.
      It took a few refreshes but ads now do display and it looks fine.

      1. Deadfast says:

        For good measure I tried in on the integrated Android browser (based on WebKit) and that works fine too.

    3. newdarkcloud says:

      What smartphone are you using? And are you using the default browser or another one you downloaded? Either of these could have an impact.

      I’m also stumped b/c the site looks great on my phone. Not saying your complaint is any less valid, but perhaps we can help identify the source of the problem.

    4. Volatar says:

      I think it’s about time to declare that that particular browser sucks.

  9. Mephane says:

    The “This site is a labor of love by” box that is displayed when ads are blocked (I access the site from different machines, so don’t worry, I see the ads, just not on one particular computer) overlaps with the sidebar at the moment.

    1. Mayhem says:

      Was going to post the same thing. Looks especially bad in Firefox.

  10. Primogenitor says:

    I like the twitter box – I think it helps sites like this feel “fresh” between the real posts.

  11. Eruanno says:

    I wouldn’t be that annoyed if there was an ad for your book, say above or below the sidebar ad or something. Just no angry blinking or jumping, please :3

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      ^This. Since it is your site, it seems a little weird that you’re not plugging your own work. I understand that you don’t it to be too intrusive, but a little plug wouldn’t hurt.

  12. newdarkcloud says:

    I find it somewhat amusing that you finally put the last few Alan Wake episodes up on the Spolier Warning page… but forgot to put the last Deus Ex: Human Revolution episodes up.

    They have become the incinerator of this blog.

    1. Shamus says:

      Has it been like that for all these months? I know I’ve let problems go, but that’s ridiculous.

      Should be fixed now.

      1. Bryan says:

        Speaking of the /spoilerwarning/ page, a character set comment.

        You’re serving up bytes using the UTF-8 encoding. Which is fine, except that the page itself claims that the charset is iso-8859-1. (“<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>” on the third line of the source, though without the Stupid Quotes present here.)

        Which would also be fine, if you only used the first 127 characters, since those are the same in both encodings. But there’s one post title, in the DX:HR season: “18 : Schrà¶dinger’s Pimp”, which doesn’t use only the first 127 characters: that o-umlaut doesn’t work. When encoded in UTF-8 (as the page is being served up), but displayed as iso8859-1, it shows up as “18 : SchràƒÂ¶dinger’s Pimp” instead.

        tl;dr: Change the charset=iso-8859-1 in the Content-Type http-equiv into charset=utf-8 instead, or change the bytes in the file being served to be in iso-8859-1. Mixing the two only works for the first 127 (basically, pure ASCII) characters.

      2. Thomas says:

        Oh you fixed it :( Also, as an aside, Newdarkcloud, are you the Escapist user of the same name? I figure it’d be a bit a bit of a coincidence otherwise, especially with most of us probably being Escapist connected :D

        1. newdarkcloud says:

          Yep. It’s the handle I use for pretty much everything. Came to the escapist for ZP and stayed for so much more. If you see a newdarkcloud, odds are it’s me.

        2. Sydney says:

          Doom is coming.

        3. Rick says:

          This was my favourite game at a previous job…

          Me: Oh, it’s broken? What’s it doing?
          **fix it while they explain**
          Me: Oh, it looks fine to me, give it another shot.
          Them: Hey, it works now, I guess it was me, sorry to bother you!

          1. Syal says:

            I can’t decide whether that’s trolling or just job security.

            1. CTrees! says:

              Definitely trolling. If you want job security, make yourself a note to fix it later in the week. “Took a lot of effort, but we tracked down the problem!”

    2. Deadfast says:

      Is my previous reply to this comment awaiting moderation or has it been swallowed up by /dev/null? I posted it, it refreshed, reply nowhere. I tried again and it told me it’s a duplicate comment.

      Anyway, what it said is that the Spoiler Warning link from the main page (shamusyoung.com) points to your YouTube account instead of the page here. Is that intentional? Seems a bit weird considering season 1-3 aren’t available from there.

  13. Alan says:

    I didn’t really like the category logos at the top, but I think that there needs to be some kind of category system somewhere?

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      It’s on the right side, under “Archives”.

      Though this comment does indicate that it needs to be more visible.

      1. BenD says:

        This. I had learned, over the years, what the icons at the top meant (and I was always TICKLED TO BITS to see a new one, or rediscover an old one with clever meaning) and while I agree that they’re not useful for new readers and contribute to clutter for everyone, a drop-down menu doesn’t come close to replacing them. Could some of the bigger categories have a link list, and the rest piled into a drop-down?

      2. MatthewH says:

        As I was one of the ones asking for easier chronological archive binging, I say thank you. Though I too took some time to find it. Actually, it took me three tries to find the “spoler warning” link (I thought I had to go back out to the main shamusyoung.com page). This may have more to do with everything moving than it being in a bad place. We’re all just so used to walking through your living room under the old configuration that we keep turning around and cracking our shins on the new coffee table.

  14. TehShrike says:

    I think the “emptiness” problem would be solved by putting a different-colored background (perhaps pure white, or something closer to white than the rest of the background) behind the post/comment content.

    Maybe even consider stretching the “content” background to the right to include the sidebar stuff.

    Something to tell the eyes “out there in the grey expanse, that is flavor. Here in the content zone, this is where the meaty goodness is packed!”

    1. Zak McKracken says:

      actually I don’t mind the cleaner design. That is: If there’s more stuff visible, it should be useful content. Wouldn’t mind that, but just adding more filer to make the site look more alive … not good design.

  15. Hyrum says:

    By the way, I thought you might think it was interesting that I got a banner ad advertising your book while on tv tropes. Probably just because I spend so much time looking at your blog, though…

  16. perry says:

    remove the g+ thingy! its taking up a LOT of space. or maybe fill that space with other share icons?
    here’s a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/cLyzo.png

    1. UTAlan says:

      Looks like that’s the Facebook “like” iframe not working. (Shamus: I removed the “(show faces)” part of the src and that seemed to fix it, fwiw.)

      EDIT: Also, if you float the wrapping p-tag left, it’ll line up with the G+ button.

    2. Kacky Snorgle says:

      Speaking of space, the category pages still have rather too much of it. The empty space between posts is larger than the posts themselves! You could easily reduce the spaces by 50% and still have a clean, readable listing….

  17. Thomas says:

    I’ve got a tiny little thin blue/darkblue bar underneath the main bar at the top that doesn’t look like it should be there? Or if it’s meant to be there, it doesn’t look right because it doesn’t add anything and it’s a different style than the actual bar.

    It doesn’t appear on Chrome, I’m on Firefox 13, Windows 7

    1. Thomas says:

      You either fixed it, or it fixed itself, gone now :D

  18. UTAlan says:

    I think I mentioned this once before a while back, but now that it is more on topic: I would recommend putting ads in the RSS feed. Adsense should have an option for Ads in Feeds. (Force the ninjas to feed you!)

  19. SteveDJ says:

    So far, so good — though I figure since you are in there tinkering around, perhaps you can fix this bug that annoys me from time to time.

    Whenever I clear my cache, the next time I come to the site, a couple fonts are all goofed up

    But after I reload, and all subsequent visits, look correct again

    P.S. First time I’ve seen your comment counter at exactly 42 – nicely done!

  20. DirtyC101 says:

    You menteioned you wanted folks to be able to explore a little more. Why aren’t there more links at the bottom of each post? When reading a webcomic, there’s usually 5 buttons at the bottom – very first comic, previous comic, home, next comic, & current comic. You have a text link pointing to the next & previous entry, but that’s it. Why not enhance that feature? At the minimum, convert them to buttons, maybe big colorful arrows with thread titles overlaid. Make it obvious you’re jumping to a new topic. Bonus points if the first few lines of text become visible when the carot hovers over the link. I’d recommend breaking it down into previous/next post in this category, previous/next post overall, and a home button. If you’re feeling frisky, code it so that a link to the book or the minecraft server or whatnot also pops up if it’s relevant.

    Just my thoughts
    DirtyC101

  21. Paul Spooner says:

    Looking good! I like the changes. Feels much cleaner. Maybe a little too clean?

    Of course, now your “about me” link from http://www.shamusyoung.com/ is broken. I seem to remember it used to work.

    This series really needs a climactic third episode. I propose:
    This Dang Website III: The Return of the Re-dang-ening

    1. Attercap says:

      This Dang Website IV: A New Dang-ening?

      I like a lot of the changes, but I do think the Categories section gets lost, especially on the /twentysidedtale/ “home” page. That (and maybe archives) could use some traction–maybe either outside of the right nav channel and just under the main nav or keep it on the right and move those two items above the ad.

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        Dang Website V: The Javascript strikes back?

        1. Bryan says:

          As long as there aren’t ever any Special Edition Dang-enings. That would just be annoying. :-P

  22. Drew says:

    Looks good. My only complaint is that the left and right frames (that is to say, the content and the linky stuff) seem too close. Throwing a handful more pixels of space in there would make it seem less jammed together. Of course if someone’s using a narrower browser window, perhaps they need it that way…

  23. newdarkcloud says:

    One thing I would say is that after all of these changes, I would check your home page (www.shamusyoung.com). With all the move, some links might not work anymore.

    It might even be a good idea to cut the home page entirely and just move all the stuff on it to Twenty Sided that’s not already. Make the home page of Twenty Sided your home page. Most of the people who come here regularly probably skip the real home page by bookmarking Twenty Sided. And the ones the don’t just have one more layer to go through before getting to it. It’s not much, but it enough for some people to have the time to think “Do I really want to be on this site right now?”.

  24. Zak McKracken says:

    A remark on the categories drop-down list:
    I’m using this only occasionally, but then it’s kind of difficult. It’s a pretty long list (dang, you sure make lots of things!), and finding an individual item can take a while, especially if I’m not exactly sure which category I’m looking for. This could be helped by dividing the single items into groups. Like: Writing, Playing, Coding, Personal … or somesuch. And having the ability to peek into the subcategories under those entries without loading a new page. Similar to a menu structure. So if I don’t know where to look, I can at least narrow that down. And if I do, it’ll be easier to find the category when it’s in a small group than in a long alphabetically ordered list.
    Quite a few posts might even profit from being listed in more than one sub-category, if that’s possible.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Totally agree. Catagorization should be a hierarchy, not a flat label. That said, this may be difficult to implement on the current platform.

      I’ve found the easiest way to locate something specific is Google( [thing you are searching for] site:http://www.shamusyoung.com/ )
      This works for just about any website actually, and is way easier than looking through even the most streamlined interface (no offense to anyone). This works for browsing as well, with the added bonus that I think it bumps up the site’s addsense score. Could be wrong about that one.

  25. Black Dove says:

    For what it is worth; the top ad bar now frequently “underlaps” the right sidebar for me in Firefox on both Windows XP and Windows 7 machines.

  26. Dwip says:

    Dig the changes thus far, though I miss the in-post category pics. The splash of color was nice.

    Three somewhat minor things, though:

    1. So if you’re basing it on Lileks, at what point are the horrible 70s living rooms going to start showing up? Could we get some 60s hotels instead? Or did the Fallout seasons of Spoiler Warning cure you of that?

    2. While the “Follow Shamus on Twitter” link is super fantastic and looks and feels just like my very own real pony, it does have the problem of looking pretty much like a regular tweet which causes me to skip over it, which is bad. Most people seem to solve this by sticking said link at the bottom of the feed, in a visually distinct font, seperated obviously from the rest of the text, which seems a very useful thing to me.

    3. Not really clear on the utility of the Search box being on the top header, not obviously labeled. For one, it looks really bizzare in IE when you squish it, and when you don’t squish it, it gets lost in the giant blue header bar. Too, it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the archive mining stuff, which is all on the sidebar, nor does it fit in with the New Here/Minecraft/Spoiler Warning stuff, which is all kind of its own thing. I have no idea if I’m explaining that very well at all.

    Also, if there’s a poll or something going, put me down in the “please advertise your awesome book on your sidebar” crowd. Please sell more books. We encourage this.

    1. Syal says:

      I like the idea of people wanting to follow Shamus on Twitter but not wanting to read the tweets.

    2. Tuck says:

      The search box getting wrapped to the next line (as in your screenshot) can be fixed by sticking “white-space: nowrap” into the class/style for the blue header bar.

      A very quiet background texture (applied via CSS on the html or body element) would look nice. See http://socket.io for a blue version. Youtube uses something like this too, rather than a flat colour.

  27. Stormkitten says:

    I like the new cleaned up look, mostly, but I think it now looks too sparse. I suggest adding a pic of a d20 between the two words (and enough space around it that it doesn’t look cramped). This would add a bit of color, and tie in with the dice pile at the bottom of the page (which should stay).

  28. Rick says:

    Looking great. Your post titles looked better when bigger though, but that’s only my opinion.

  29. Piflik says:

    That new background with the faint gray squares is straining my eyes quite a bit.

    (It is a bit better on my CRT, but on my LCD it is really bad…)

    1. BlckDv says:

      I spent a couple minutes trying to figure out what element was broken; if these tan boxes were supposed to have content in them, were they links?

      And then I face palmed.

      Having moved past the confused state; I like the bit of texture they add to the site, but the ones very close to the background grey do produce strain when I try and rest my eyes on them as I “work” to see the boundary lines.

      1. Piflik says:

        Yeah…I think it is the straight lines combined with extremely low contrast…

    2. Jamfalcon says:

      I’m finding them very distracting; they keep drawing my eyes away from the actual content text of the site.

      1. samalander says:

        same, especially the random squares of colour :(

        1. Thomas says:

          I’m sorry but I’m going to have to ditto this :( I don’t really think it helps it look less plain and it’s distracting :( Really like the way cool stuff is popping up everywhere though :D Buy this dang book is great

        2. Rick says:

          I think it looks good. All I’d change would be maybe make the pattern smaller (repeats a little more) and make it fixed so it doesn’t leap out at you when scrolling.

          1. Thomas says:

            It’s definitely better with only shades of grey, I don’t like it at the moment still (and it causes some weirds blobs in between posts sometimes) but this might just be because its new and I could believe that I could grow used to it and even end up liking it

      2. Deadfast says:

        Likewise, the blue tiles are extremely distracting to me. And the rest sort of reminds me of a bathroom floor…

    3. Tharwen says:

      I don’t like the tiling.

      However, this is a perfect place to post a link to this page. It has maths in it!

    4. Piflik says:

      Much better now. The round corners and gradients really make a difference.

  30. Nonesuch says:

    Not exactly website related, but the playlist for the mass effect 2 season of Spoiler Warning is really useful. I can’t count the number of times I’ve just put it on and let it run (mostly for hilarious background noise) Would it be possible to get the seasons that have come since then in a playlist format as well?

  31. samalander says:

    ok, this is probably really picky, but could there be a little more space between the text and the sidebar? At the moment it’s just small enough that my eye keeps trying to follow the line over and getting confused because it hits a blue header or a different font :(

  32. Chris says:

    I like the twitter feed and the other changes. Would not be bothered if you had a personal advert (already got the book so no need for another one). I am commenting just because it is truly better than working at the moment. So now with .02 thrown I can go back to lurking.

  33. Torsten says:

    So far the changes look pretty good. I do think however that the icons on top should be back. I can’t be the only one who used them to navigate around the site, and if a new visitor looks at the front page, they’d probably want something to click on to see different content. Dropboxes just do not have the same appeal.

  34. TMTVL says:

    It looks quite good, but could you up the contrast on the background by ~20%? The orange squares made me think I had a dirty monitor until I saw it at an angle and noticed the border between the squares.

    EDIT: And of course I can’t delete this post after noticing others were complaining about the squares. Never mind me.

    EDIT2: And before I forget, thanks for putting in all the effort to please a bunch of whiny entitled people who you’ve never even met. Yes, I do include myself in that group.

  35. TheeNickster says:

    On the new “Buy my dang books” section:

    It’s animated, and animated is bad. Continuously looping animation is what made Ad-block plus more popular than all other addons combined!
    Maybe put static images of your books side by side?

    1. anaphysik says:

      That would be a lot better. Right now it’s really annoying. I already bought your dang books, Shamus! Stop punishing actual customers! Irony!

  36. (The following references this article/post/page at the time this is written)

    The third “98 comments:” could be removed.

    How many comments there are is mentioned twice earlier anyway.
    At the top of the article/post as “98 comments”.
    And at the bottom as “There are now 98 comments. Almost a hundred!” to the right of the dice line.

    The third one is overly redundant and eats space.
    The lie above it can then also be removed as the fist comment/comments are “boxed” and does not need a separator line like that.

    The thin line below “Previous: This Dang Website” but before the dice line could perhaps get a matching vertical one on the right side of the article.
    Alternatively make it a box around the article instead.

    There is also a large empty area below the article/post and before the “Previous: This Dang Website”
    That should probably be reduced a little, it almost looks like something is missing in that space currently.

    At the bottom of each comments there is “Reply to this»”
    this would look better at the top of the comment, right under the comment number/dice.
    This will also allow the removal of the separator line at the bottom of the comment.

    The “Links” (and the RSS Links) in the right side menu, tried them right aligned yet?

    The spacing between the main content and the right sidebar/column is a tad tight, as somebody else pointed out here maybe add a little more air.

    It wouldn’t hurt if the last 5 tweets was shown, currently it’s only 4.

    “Follow Shamus on Twitter:”
    Might look better at the bottom, under the last tweet. But if it is to stay where it is then loosing “on Twitter” might be smart as it does say “Twitter” in large letters in the heading above.

    The “Buy My Dang Books!” part, wouldn’t hurt with a normal link under the widget thing, that could lead to your “book page”, maybe call it something like “Other books I have written”.

    “Archives” and “Categories”
    They should probably be combined into the same area, they are far too little content on their own to have their own heading, a combined heading would look better.

    “RSS Links”
    Not sure about this one, I see no immediate logical place to put them otherwise, but they do seem a tad few to have their own heading.
    Oh I know, now. Place them with the “Archives” and “Categories”.
    That section is all about accessing the site i a different way (by archive, category, or by RSS feeds)

    what the heck to call this section I have no idea about currently though. “Stuff” ? *laughs* Oh, I know “Miscellaneous”, that seems fitting and lets you re-use that area for other stuff in the future. (a new filter, Tag based maybe?) It’ll also let people see how Miscellaneous is spelled (damn finger twister).

    Under the “Post Comment” button there is a separator line, it can probably be removed as well.
    There is also some air between the “Post Comment” button and the dicepile that could be reduced some more.
    It would also look way cooler i the dicepile image was alphatrasparent so that the site background shows through around/between the dice.

    The footer blurb is fine, but the “Image hosting for Dm of the Rings is sponsored by the lovely people at Mu.Nu.” should probably start on it s own line, considering you have a line break after the comma in the sentence above.

    The blue graphic bar has a different blue grading/color than the one at the top of the site, is this intentional?

    “Support This Fine Website”
    Fine and discreet. But one issue though. The Donate button. It almost looks like it’s part of the ad under it.
    Maybe add a new heading below the button/above the ad called “Advertisements”
    Who knows, you might get site sponsors later too and can then call the section “Advertisements/Sponsors”.
    As it is now it almost looks like you are saying to donate by clicking the ad. And someone bit loose on the mouse could click the ad instead of the donate button by mistake too.

    And finally (for this comment at this time) the last thing.
    The very bottom of the site/page. Underneath the Twentysided footer.
    Maybe add “(c) Shamus Young YEAR” and possibly a Creative Commons link to the license so people/other sites can be informed what they can/can not do with the stuff you write/make on your site.

    Here is the license creator http://creativecommons.org/choose/
    A brief overview of the base licenses http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
    Maybe the “Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA” license?
    The image is very nonintrusive and could be placed after a “(c) Shamus Young 2012” for example http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/3.0/88×31.png

    Oh and if you need me to explain some of the suggestions above, let me know and I’ll do a quick screenshot mock up if needed.

    EDIT:
    If you look at http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/
    there is a grey/blank area between each article/post teaser.
    This should be transparent and show the background pattern instead.

  37. Viktor says:

    I like the square background, but the random yellow is too much. The blue is fine, but the yellow draws my eyes away from the content. It also clashes when it overlaps with various parts of the actual site.

  38. Tharwen says:

    Has the title just changed?

    I get the feeling it has, but I can’t remember what the old one looked like…

    1. Thomas says:

      It’s one he uses elsewhere I think, but it has changed. The last one before this was T s W h E a N m T u Y s S y I o D u E n D g

      1. Tharwen says:

        It still says that!

        At the time I wrote that comment, I think the title had a white, non-gradient background.

        1. Thomas says:

          It changed again, he’s clearly been doing a lot of work :D When I wrote it said ‘Twenty Sided’ against a black baground

          1. Thomas says:

            And it’s back. I’m not unconvinced that Shamus hasn’t rigged it to continuously change now, its been changed so much. Maybe a day/night cycle even since black is an option? :D We’ll see

            Yep it definitely seems to change. That’s cool

  39. newdarkcloud says:

    Something weird just happened to your website. I’m using chrome, and I see this:
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/krqvz95a9qp26sr/TSGlitch.jpg

    This issue does not crop up on Firefox.

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      I should note that you’ve fixed it now.

  40. Thomas says:

    Hah, talk about not seeing the trees for the forest, I somehow didn’t spot any of the new changes except that you’d changed the colours of the tiles :D

    Those tiles definitely draw attention and brighten the place up, I like them. I hope your advertising is okay having it all the way down like that.

    It makes the top tile look a bit askew tho, but I think I’m over looking things now and can’t convince myself that anything is normal :D

  41. Ethan says:

    Looks a lot friendlier to me! Great work.

  42. MikeShikle says:

    Two things, a bug and a suggestion:

    1. Clicking on the programing section just refreshes the page youre on =/

    2. You have SW in your header as well as to the right, it would be a good idea to take it out of the header and place a link to your reviews or rants there. Again, to let people know you got lots of content. I still think you should try and move the categories tab to a more visible place, so it doesn’t look like the site is just “Spoiler Warning and also sometimes Programing and maybe in the past Comics”

  43. Tharwen says:

    I don’t think the fancy low-contrast not-quite-square tiled background goes well with the high-contrast word-2003-esque gradient-filled boxes…

    Oh, and whenever I go to a dead page like this one, all the formatting gets messed up and stuff.

    1. Mark says:

      Yep, the gradients don’t suit the new style at all.
      The rest of the site looks pretty good, specially the new sidebar. May I suggest getting rid of the white background and the border on these icons?
      Also, I thought you were looking to promote your book? That would be the perfect spot for an ad!

    2. The Hokey Pokey says:

      I’m not a huge fan of the background squares either.

  44. Thomas says:

    Hey Shamus? Programing? I don’t think that word converts the same way as kidnaping.

  45. newdarkcloud says:

    I’m liking the new theme for the site, it looks cool and really draws focuses you on the content. The articles are like the first thing you see.

  46. Jamfalcon says:

    I really like the newest version of the layout, but I still have one minor quibble with it. The grey box that the post and comments are on looks (to me at least) far to similar to a comment box. I just checking what other people were saying about the newest changes, so I scrolled to the bottom and started looking for new comments. Because of the way the comments nest inside of each other, I thought they were all responding to one really post with a light grey background.

    Now, obviously this is something that people using the site a lot will just get used to pretty quick, but personally I think it would work better if this grey box just cut off at the start of the comments, or if it was more distinct from the grey of some comment boxes.

    But on the whole I’m really liking the new layout, especially the comics/programming/SW buttons.

  47. Steve C says:

    One comment about the new theme:
    You should ditch your photo (gravatar image) on your main blog page. 12 photos of yourself on your main page is a bit much. It’s fine on your posts or comments but there’s literally a dozen Shamuses (Shami?) watching me read your blog. It’s creepy.

    tl:dr
    Ditch gravatar images on http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/
    Keep gravatar images on http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/*

  48. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Just my opinion about the border,but it doesnt mesh that well with nested comments.Maybe you should keep it just for the article text.

    1. Piflik says:

      Yupp…I was just about to say this. It looks a bit as if all comments were part of one single conversation.

  49. Mailbox says:

    Website looks a lot better. Could use more explosions though.

  50. Tharwen says:

    Wait… does the ‘comics’ box show a random picture every time or have you just been changing it often?

  51. Thomas says:

    I love it :D The tiles work really well now, the way they drop off like that

  52. Thomas says:

    I’m getting this?

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function sy_show_dice_random_limited() in /home/shamusyo/public_html/twentysidedtale/wp-content/themes/Roller/functions.php on line 141

    also your funny comment comments have gone :(

  53. PAK says:

    I really like how this version came out, Shamus. Simple and focused, but beautiful. The new sidebar design organizes content more effectively than any other mechanism I can recall you using.

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