gatekeepeR's Place
My little slice of the 'net
Re-visiting an old topic…
0One of the things I’ve been working on lately is keeping an eye on site stats – trying to understand how they work and all that. Part of it is just trying to understand SEO, part of it is just my own idle curiosity. It’s interesting to see just what takes the interest of people who stop by my humble musings.
A past post of mine recently moved across one of the “search terms” and has been displaying on my dashboard. I wrote it back in August 2010, almost three years ago. At the time, I was commenting on the latest set of allegations regarding Lance Armstrong’s doping.
By now, everyone has heard of the findings over the last year. In exchange for reduced sentences, former members of USPS testified that there was indeed, a culture of doping present during Comeback 1.0 (99-05), and likely in Comeback 2.0 (09-10). Lance has even admitted as much, without much of a sense of remorse. The ASO has vacated his 7 victories, choosing not to re-assign a winner. Johan Bruyneel is no longer involved in professional cycling. Lance has also been banned from competing in any event which USADA has some oversight in.
There’s been numerous commentaries over the actions of the governing bodies – some say it was too much, others not enough. I don’t really have any opinion on it. ASO had a tough time, because let’s face it, in hindsight, it seems that half of the pro peleton was doping. It certainly doesn’t help that Jan Ullrich (runner up several times) as well as Ivan Basso has been implicated in past doping practices (Basso even served a suspension for his association with Operacion Puerto).
I offered up a couple of thoughts as to what might happen should Armstrong’s “guilt” be proved. To some extent, I feel prophetic. ;-) (more…)
Quick review of “Almost Flat UI”
I’ve been working on a theme for re-doing this site. While digitalnature’s Mystique has served me well over the last couple of years, I’ve been feeling it’s time for a facelift. Since I’ve been working with Zurb’s Foundation, I stumbled across Amit Gaur’s “Almost Flat UI“. It’s inspired/drawn from Designmodo’s Flat-UI for the Bootstrap Framework, but adapted to be used with Foundation. You might see it in action here in the next few weeks.
At first glance, it’s an impressive work. He’s adding more “button styles” and other such tweaks to what already seems to be a pretty solid framework. But I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed when I start digging into the code.
All of these “major” frameworks are written in SCSS or LESS or some other CSS pre-processor. I haven’t gotten that far yet (in learning the methodology behind pre-processor styles), so I’m still using the basic CSS file. The one site (Greensboro Pony Run) I’ve taken start to finish with Zurb uses v3 (which still supports IE8), but I’m using v4 for my re-design. Quite frankly, on my own site, I don’t care if scare away IE8 folks. I don’t think that I’ll ever have enough of a corporate following (the only ones still forced into older versions of IE either due to upgrade policies or OS support policies) to justify using v3 on this project. But I digress….
The “stock” full version of Foundation stands at 116KB, 91KB minified. The CSS file for Almost Flat UI is 341KB, 295KB minified. That’s humongous! Both files are 3x the “stock” versions!
While it’s true that more and more of the web these days connects via broadband, I’m still not sold on forcing end-users to download nearly half a Megabyte of data before you start accounting for images. To be fair, I’m beginning to be of the opinion that 100KB of CSS is too much. By the time WordPress plugins add in their own CSS and JS files, you’re asking a user to download 1 Megabyte. On a standard cable connection, it’s not too bad, but when you’re building for mobile, connection speeds are spotty at best.
Near as I can tell from his CSS file, what he’s done is rather than just adjusting the original Foundation CSS for the Almost Flat design, he’s recreated the original with his own changes. Sometimes repeating some sections at least once, sometimes twice. It seems like a bit of overkill. (I don’t want to call it laziness just yet, because I don’t think that I have the “community standing” to call it that when my own CSS files are sometimes un-ordered and messy). To me, it would have made more sense if you’re repeating code to just strip out everything but the color, background-color, etc. so you could still leave the original CSS intact.
I bring this up because while I’m working on my re-design, I’ve been debating how I want to use everything in terms of a framework. Overriding specific colors in the CSS seems to make a lot more sense than re-building the entire code base, although at this point, v4 is pretty mature.
Just food for thought. I don’t want to take away from the strong work that Amit’s done already, but if anyone wants to use it in their own projects, just be prepared that it’s not quite ready for a development environment, I think.
Weighing in on a site’s re-design
One of the sites I regularly visit has had a rather interesting set of discussions going on over the last couple of weeks. To be fair, it’s been ongoing for a few months, but it’s really picked up steam in the last few. That site is Techsideline.com (TSL). It’s an unofficial sports-centric site for Virginia Tech fans. I won’t go into the history of the site, but suffice it to say, it’s been around since 1997 (interestingly enough, going live on my birthday – March 12, 1996).
Will Stewart is the founder, and over the years, it’s been my default go-to for any major sports-related news about VT. The main feature of the site (I think) has been the message boards, allowing a community of dispersed fans to come together and share our thoughts on the state of the program. The subscriber’s-only material featuring in-depth thoughts, reviews, break-downs, etc is excellent, and to me, worth the price of admission.
On January 11, 2012, Will debuted a major re-design of the site. To say that the re-design was met with hostility would be an understatement of epic proportions. Many of the “old dogs” absolutely hated the new forums. Enough disliked it that Will’s page-views dropped by 30%, and he received many emails from disgruntled folks that said they were leaving because they no longer liked the site – they refused to “upgrade” to the newer forums. Subsequently, his ad revenues have dropped.
The “old” site used what’s known as “threaded” (or what I call “nested”) forums. This was a hand-coded solution from way back in the day, before forum software such as PHPbb and vBulletin were available. To bring the site forward, he upgraded to vBulletin – a solid choice given the number of users and the additional professional support provided by vB. The problem lies in the fact that nearly every major bulletin package out there now uses “linear” format. Linear is as it’s name suggests, a linear flow of discussions.
The major difference between the two is that threaded formats tend to be more like emails – subject & message, and can be displayed as a “stair-step” view. This lends itself to quick “one-liners” where the subject is the message and then that’s it. Linear encourages more in-depth discussions, and if you want to “reply” to someone else’s post, you usually hit “reply with quote” to start a “sub-discussion”. The newest posts are always at the end of the individual topic.
So after ten years, it’s easy to see why the shift from threaded to linear would be met with such derision. Will managed to get a plugin on VB to display a “threaded view” (Threaded Overlay, actually) to appease those sticks in the mud, but it doesn’t seem to be helping with his site traffic and such. Now, Will & his staff are trying to gain feedback on what to do. They’re toying with the notion of just sucking it up and moving ahead as is, bringing back the old stuff in a limited format, or scrapping everything and bringing back the old format entirely. The vast majority (or at least the most vocal) seem to prefer the old format. (more…)