I tweaked the site in a number of ways today, including:
- Updating to WordPress 1.5.
- Installing and heavily tweaking the Geekniche theme. Update: I switched back to a tweaked version of the old theme.
- Adding the Customizable Post Listings plugin.
- Installing the StatTraq plugin.
- Updating some of the links. I particularly recommend looking at the computer research policy blog.
- Adding threaded comments. This doesn’t thread old comments obviously, but the extra structure may be helpful for new ones.
Overall, I think this is an improvement, and it addresses a few of my earlier problems. If you have any difficulties or anything seems “not quite right”, please speak up. A few other tweaks to the site may happen in the near future.
Personally, I think this new theme isn’t very good.
– rare fonts like “Lucida Grande” or “Elephant”.
– possibly related to lack of the strange fonts: line spacing and font size of articles are too large.
– 3d borders are heavy. What about 1px to 3px solid in a suitable dark green, or no border at all like the sidebar?
– some sidebar headings (e.g. “Recent Comments”) don’t have the font-weight:bold like they should.
– a:hover should not be black, links become like plain text. I suggest leaving green text and setting either background-color:white or font-weight:bold.
I hadn’t had any problems with the earlier system. My personal view: 1. Visually, some of the combinations (white on black-green-white in the title; red on green; white on green) are perhaps not very pleasing to the eye. 2. In Recent Comments, it’s difficult to tell apart the comment and the name of whoever wrote it (e.g. ‘Thinking the Unthought Michael Schr?der’). 3. Maybe it’s just my browser but I really get ‘Schr?der’.
I believe most of your suggestions are addressed now (thanks). Any more?
I’m also studying machine learning. I recently upgraded to tikiwiki. You might check out my site for inspiration!
http://mindrec.net
I prefer the old theme than the one you tried yesterday. I actually like the green. I took a brief look at the Computer Research Policy blog and it looks very interesting. Thanks for telling us about it.
Is there something wrong with the “recent comments” section in the right column? Comments seem to be being posted without appearing there. This seems to have started after the site update.
The semantics just changed, slightly. Instead of ‘the 5 most recent comments’ it is ‘the 5 most recent comments at different posts’. I don’t have a preference between these (please mention if you do).
I was wondering about the same thing. I prefer the old version.
There seems to be one other oddness. See this screenshot for an example. For some reason there are weird things going in the comments section.
This is an example of a ‘pingback’. When someone/somewhere (in this case, me/here) refers to an article, the blog software adds an automated comment. The author name is confusing, but the presence seems reasonable because it allows discussions to cross sites (at least theoretically).