I’ve decided to upgrade “Alas” to the current version of WordPress. (Much more secure that way).
Unfortunately, doing so has inevitably broken lots of stuff and it’ll take me a while to fix said stuff. Like, er, the recent comments thingy in the sidebar. Thanks in advance for being patient while I figure this stuff out.
UPDATE: Yeah, the whole blog looks like crap. It’ll get better, right? Of course right. Now go have some cookies and milk and go to bed.
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Great response to the Mace bill by AOC (video at link).
The angels are a cute touch.
You can make it look like it used to, right? I feel like I’m on a home and garden blog right now.
Thanks for bringing back the old color scheme.
Thanks for the ongoing work – it’s nice to see the familiar look start to come back.
A request, if you’re taking them? I preferred the previous clock time if today/calendar date if before midnight method of identifying recent comments, rather than “10 hours 55 minutes ago” and the like. I can usually remember approximately what time I’ve checked the blog last, or what date if it’s been a day or more, but doing the math required to figure out that “8 hours 22 minutes ago” means 3:15pm which is just after I checked last is more math than I’m capable of for casual browsing. :)
We have threaded comments now? Yay!
Testing threaded comments.
Weird! I don’t know if I like threaded comments on Alas.
I like having the option to thread or unthread comments, depending on whether I want to see the discussion structure or just find the most recent comments.
Failing that, the comment structure at Less Wrong is pretty readable.
What I really want is trn for the web, but competent people have told me that it would take a programmer-year to code, and as far as I can tell, people are so disgusted with usenet that no one is willing to write it.
I don’t know if I like it, either. It was an accidental byproduct of the upgrade. I figure we’ll try it for a month or so, and then get rid of it if folks don’t like it.
I second this request.
I can’t do that, unfortunately — the swell plugin I had, which did the before or after midnight formatting, doesn’t work with the current version of WordPress. The best I can do with the plugin I have is to put the date and time on every comment; hope that’s okay.
Having the timestamp in clock time sure works better for me than the “x hours ago” timestamp, definitely. :)
Not sure how I feel about the nested comments – I’m a fan from way back in Usenet days but I also used a threaded reader to catch new updates, whereas nesting with just the “new comments” sidebar leads to some fishing expeditions. I’m sure a bunch of stuff will shake out as you get the place humming again, though.
Thanks!
Aw, trn.
The timestamp that you’ve got on there now works just as well for me as the old plugin did.
Maybe it’s just my eyes, but I am finding the block of white space around pull-quotes kind of irritating. I think, in part, it’s the spacing within the white space, but also the size of the white space feels out of proportion to the width, etc. of the post.
Upgrading is always a work in progress with so many hitches (3 more steps, 1 more hour than expected – that’s my baseline rule of doing anything with a computer.) Thanks for the hard work you’ve put in! I look forward to the eventually complete upgrade.
Testing the “add an image” plugin!
[img]http://www.amptoons.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/alien_with_pet.png[/img]
UPDATE: Well, it’s not perfect, but it seems to work okay, which is more than I can claim for the other images-in-comments plugins I tried.
Richard, I agree. For some reason, I’m finding the blockquotes element hard to control in this theme. I’ll see if I can figure it out.
Aaaaah! Time eater!
Okay, I’ve upgraded the blockquotes. I think it looks better now, but let me know if it still bugs you.
That is much better. As Simple Truth said, thanks for all the hard work!
I am not a fan of the threaded comments. It makes it more arduous to read through if I’m just going back to read new comments.
I have to agree with Jake about the threaded comments. On the ADL post, I am finding that they make things very confusing.
Ditto, re: threaded comments (just mailed Barry about it). They don’t only make things confusing, they make it much easier for people with bad arguments to duck and weave.
I’m really not fond of threaded comments. Threaded comments break up the dialogue into a bunch of private conversations instead of an ongoing, open discussion. They also litter the new comments throughout the page instead of consolidating them at the bottom.
Okay, I have to agree with (almost) everyone else; threaded comments just aren’t “Alas,” are they?
Threaded comments have been turned off.
A reason I like threaded comments is that derails automatically get confined to a single subsection of the comment area. (I’m strongly in favor of threaded comments – but perhaps they should only go a few layers deep?)
Threaded comments suck because as new comments come in, people go back to the thread to read them – but the comment could be anywhere in the thread and you basically have to scan the entire thread to find the new entries. It’s fine if there are nine comments and you’re looking for the new tenth one. Less fine if there are 200 comments in the thread. And good luck if you haven’t been around for a few days or get easily confused by Wall of Text spells.
So, right decision there.
Amp – given how Usenet originally worked, advocating for non-threaded blog comments is what should really evoke the “BACK IN MY DAY WE HAD TO POST WITH ONE HAND TIED BEHIND OUR BACK, OVER A 2800 BAUD MODEM, WITHOUT A KILLFILE, AND WE LIKED IT!” rants.
If you’d told me in 1997 that I’d be saying “discussion threads, such a pain,” I’d have laughed you out of my living room (with its dedicated phone line to run my WWIV board with its crude Usenet ports, and its primitive install of trn). But threads don’t feel like Alas, it’s true.