Site front page

[teanndaorsa]

I'm experimenting with a tweak to the front page display that suits the way I've been editing / publishing a bit better.

It used to be that Gromet would collect up several stories for a single site, which meant it made sense to show the dates of recent updates in terms of which sites got updated on which days. I'm not so much a fan of doing that because some of the less busy sites can go weeks before getting more than one submission; so my habit is to plow through the stories in roughly the order they were received.

That's meant that most of the "Updates" section that you see first is a list of dates, all with "Bound Stories" next to them, plus some other sites; a lot of repetition and not an awful lot of information. Now instead you'll see a list of story titles and authors, so you can see how many stories for each section, and from which authors. Tapping on those stories will still take you to the relevant section, so it's not changed the way you navigate to new stories, it's just showing more information as you do.

I'm interested in hearing any constructive feedback folks have. I'm not going to overhaul the whole thing as it's working reasonably well and I have other priorities, but there may be other simple tweaks that might aid usability.

[loras pa6]

Seems logical to me

[loras pa6]

I'm going to add, currently the way it appears on the Mobil version leaves room for improvements

[teanndaorsa]

I'm going to add, currently the way it appears on the Mobil version leaves room for improvements

That's fair, I'd be interested to hear specifics about what you thought could be better? And if possible, information on device and resolution you use as that will help me reproduce your experience.

Another reader has brought to my attention that stories don't look great on high resolution tablets (because they fall somewhere between the desktop and mobile), so at some point I want to look at the site styles and polish them a bit to improve things. That may have to wait until I get some assistance with the editing but it's on my list.

[loras pa6]

I'm on an iPhone (8 specifically) but my statement was not about resolution (which seems fine on my device) but about how the way the new update lists displays the stories info

All the story title/author/section info within the specific date all blend in to one long sentence

I will email you a screen capture so you can see what I mean

[teanndaorsa]

Interesting, what you're seeing is what you'd see if the https://grometsplaza.net/plaza2.css file was the old version not the new version. I did tell CloudFlare to update its cached version of that file, but it's possible either that didn't take, or users browsers are caching the old version of the file for other reasons. I've told CloudFlare to update the cache again, but if you still see the rubbish looking page, then a refresh would clear it. Obviously most people aren't going to refresh though so I may have to find some other more comprehensive way to kick it out of their caches.

It's supposed to look like this (on mobile, though the desktop version is similar):

[loras pa6]

Yes that is what I see on the desktop and laptop. I did just try to force refresh on Safari but it did not change

Out of curiosity I opened my Chrome app and it matches your image

Maybe it is strictly a Safari issue?

[teanndaorsa]

More likely you use Safari normally, so it has the old styles cached; Chrome won't share a cache with Safari so it gets the styles afresh. If you visit the above link and force refresh that it might work.

[loras pa6]

  That link did do it

[teanndaorsa]

Time for me to drop the cache lifetime of that file then, so that the next time I tinker with styles there's a better chance that people will pick up on the new hotness.

[icy]

Is anyone having problems with the color highlighting too? I'm having problems with the colours which highlight the stories in the updates column. The green letters on the grey background for the buried section, makes it nearly impossible to read the title.  Is anyone having that problem too? I'm using good old Win 7 and Seamonkey as browser, but have that with other browsers too.

[teanndaorsa]

Is anyone having problems with the color highlighting too? I'm having problems with the colours which highlight the stories in the updates column. The green letters on the grey background for the buried section, makes it nearly impossible to read the title.  Is anyone having that problem too? I'm using good old Win 7 and Seamonkey as browser, but have that with other browsers too.

That's not just you; it's just a bad choice of colours for that section. It so rarely gets new stories that it's not something I checked when I was making the updates. I've tweaked it to to a higher contrast pair of colours now.

[icy]

Is anyone having problems with the color highlighting too? I'm having problems with the colours which highlight the stories in the updates column. The green letters on the grey background for the buried section, makes it nearly impossible to read the title.  Is anyone having that problem too? I'm using good old Win 7 and Seamonkey as browser, but have that with other browsers too.

That's not just you; it's just a bad choice of colours for that section. It so rarely gets new stories that it's not something I checked when I was making the updates. I've tweaked it to to a higher contrast pair of colours now.

Yep, now I can read it. Thanks.