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SITE REVIEW: AdamMessinger.com

  • logoleptic
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Post April 6th, 2005, 11:17 am

The site -- http://www.adammessinger.com/

I recently re-designed my weblog from the ground up, and I'm interested in feedback and bug reports for the new design.

Known Issues

* The styles.css file needs some cleanup to group declarations and make better use of the cascade.

* I separated content and structure from presentation, but I haven't separated the behavior layer: there's still JavaScript in the <body> element.

* I perpetrated an ugly JavaScript hack to make the entire masthead act as a link back to the home page. Is there a more elegant way to do this?

* Once person has already complained about the use of sIFR for some headings. You can see my response here.


Thanks in advance! :)

-- Adam
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Post April 6th, 2005, 11:17 am

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Post April 6th, 2005, 11:30 am

Where's the link?
"bless us and love us so we can dance and truly be free"
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Post April 6th, 2005, 12:42 pm

613flavah wrote:
Where's the link?


'Doh! Fixed, thanks.
  • rip
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Post April 6th, 2005, 12:46 pm

Nice job. I really like the layout and design. Really easy on the eyes. Only a couple things I noticed.

When you go to your photoblog page, and click home, it doesn't take you back to the home page, only the home page of the photoblog. That may have been your intent, though.

Also, and maybe it's because there's no archives yet on the site, but at the bottom of the page where it says "Previously" I take it that should be a link to the archives?

One other thing I noticed when clicking through your links, I get this error randomly:

Error establishing a database connection
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost.

Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
Are you sure that the database server is running?

Other than that, it looks good in IE6 and Firefox.
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Post April 6th, 2005, 1:05 pm

rip wrote:
Nice job. I really like the layout and design. Really easy on the eyes.


Thanks!

rip wrote:
When you go to your photoblog page, and click home, it doesn't take you back to the home page, only the home page of the photoblog. That may have been your intent, though.


Right. "Home" takes you to the photoblog's home page and "Blog" takes you to the weblog's home page.

rip wrote:
Also, and maybe it's because there's no archives yet on the site, but at the bottom of the page where it says "Previously" I take it that should be a link to the archives?


I'm holding off on date-based archives until I find a plugin for WordPress that allows interactive browsing of previous posts. I know it exists, but I need to google around and find it again. If you want to see what date archives will ultimately look like, try this: http://www.adammessinger.com/2005/03/

That will give you a look at the month of March, five posts at a time, with a calendar in the sidebar for quick browsing.

The "Previously" section just contains excerpts of some older posts that haven't fallen off into the archives yet. I did this to keep the page size down. I used to have 10 full posts on the home page, now I only have five full posts and four excerpts. Along with mercilessly trimming the sidebar down, this cut the home page size almost in half.

To make things more obvious, maybe I should add a brief explanation below the "Previously" heading of what that section contains.

rip wrote:
One other thing I noticed when clicking through your links, I get this error randomly:

Error establishing a database connection
(snipped)


My host is going through some growing pains at the moment, brought on in large part by the onslaught of link spam (comment/trackback/referrer/etc.). Efforts to solve the problem are underway. Meanwhile, I just turned caching back on to decrease load times (won't help with the database error, though).

Thanks again for the input. :)
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Post April 7th, 2005, 12:10 pm

Over my lunch hour I added an archive page listing posts by date and another page listing all my categories (like a site map, basically). This should make the site easier to navigate overall. I also added a little explanation to the "Previously" section. Thanks for the good suggestions, rip.

Anyone else want to weigh in?

NOTE: If you've visited this site once before, you may need to clear your browser cache in order to see the changes.
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Post April 7th, 2005, 1:18 pm

Overall it;s nice. Id' change the main text font style into a non serif one thouhg. I'm thinking verdana, tahoma or arial.
The site is nice ;)
Admin Forum
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Post April 7th, 2005, 9:33 pm

dojo wrote:
Overall it;s nice. Id' change the main text font style into a non serif one thouhg. I'm thinking verdana, tahoma or arial.


I'm afraid this is one of those personal preference things where I'm just going to have to stand my ground. ;-)

I'm partial to serif fonts for body copy and sans-serif for headlines. Thanks for the suggestion, though. :)

dojo wrote:
The site is nice ;)


Thanks!
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Post April 7th, 2005, 10:16 pm

Here's a thought: anyone out there with a hand-held device (cell phone, PDA, etc.) who could tell me what it looks like on one of those browsers? This is one thing I can't test myself at all.

Thanks.
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Post April 8th, 2005, 6:40 pm

I think your site is pretty nice except it is kinda hard to read with all of the bright colors

I suggest using more colors that aren't so hard on the eyes
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Post April 9th, 2005, 12:34 pm

MyIP wrote:
I think your site is pretty nice except it is kinda hard to read with all of the bright colors

I suggest using more colors that aren't so hard on the eyes


Thanks for the suggestion. Believe it or not, it's actually toned down from the original color scheme I started with. ;)

This is another one of those personal preference matters where I'm going to have to stand by my decision. I've also gotten several complements on the colors, mostly from women who think they're "pretty." To each his / her own, I suppose.

Thanks for the input. :)
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Post April 9th, 2005, 12:40 pm

Something new and odd is happening with my site, and I'm hoping someone here can confirm whether this is a problem.

On three different Windows PCs other than my own, the story titles appear in italics. In each case, it was because the computers only had the italic version of Lucida Sans installed. My computer has the normal, bold, italic, and bold-italic versions.

Is this common on Windows PCs? Do the titles appear in italics for you? I'd hate to switch to Verdana, which was doing some unattractive things at that size. My font declaration for the story titles is as follows:

Code: [ Select ]
font: bold 1.3em 'Lucida Sans','Lucida Sans Unicode',Geneva,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,'Bitstream Vera Sans',Arial,sans-serif;


Thanks.
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Post April 19th, 2005, 10:33 pm

I liked your photo-blog. Good site, though some of the things that i disliked...

1) I dont like the colour- scheme its very bright.Use some pastels.

2) Fonts look out of place. I still believe that if u use verdana or palentino-linotype ,this site would look much better. As it is hard to read among all this bright colours.

3) Use some sapce between header image and navigation area.

Anyways these r just my personal views.
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Post April 26th, 2005, 7:21 pm

the site looks really good in IE6. Nice job!
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Post April 26th, 2005, 11:47 pm

I get a "Missing MySQL" error message.
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Post April 26th, 2005, 11:47 pm

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