12.10.06
Site Updates, Poll Question Suggestions
It appears that we are in for the "long haul" here in our campaign against Microvell. I must admit that I personally believed it would only take a week to ten days of boycottnovell.com pressure before Microsoft and Novell would capitulate and renounce the deal. ;^ ) I seem to have underestimated their resolve.
As a result, this site was put up in haste and it is only now that we have had the time to apply some tweaking and new features. We’ve been working hard to go back and index all of the previous articles, the fruits of which some folks have already noticed in the sidebar to the right – the new Categories Cloud and the Related Posts links.
The Categories Cloud helps find related articles within a certain category, it is easy to tell which categories are more relevant and populated since the relative size of the font indicates the relative size of the category. Whenever you view a particular article, you will also be presented with links to Related Posts, the hope is to make site navigation easier. Your feedback would be appreciated, are these features helpful? Confusing? What (w|c)ould be better?
Also, I would like to start adding Polls to the site, perhaps one a week. What I don’t have is a pool of questions to draw from, so I am hoping that we can get some suggestions.
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shane said,
December 10, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Funny that since this is the only article in site news, there are no related posts. But, on other articles there are, really.
no_name said,
December 11, 2006 at 2:57 am
Clouds don’t look good in Opera… =(
shane said,
December 11, 2006 at 9:21 am
Oy, it looks like the fonts overrun their list items and trample all over one another, I will play with that a bit, thanks.
Anyone out there using internet exploder? How mangled is it in there?
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 11, 2006 at 9:44 am
I see that the text size was modified, Shane, but is there any way of rescaling or scaling them non-linearly so that “Microsoft” and “Novell” are no longer gigantic and somewhat obstrusive?
shane said,
December 11, 2006 at 9:54 am
I have changed the overall range from 6-30px to 6-24px, and changed the size of the li element in the category cloud div, so the other ‘pods’ should retain formatting and line height as always, the category cloud is spaced larger to allow for larger type.
Opera 9 looks OK now, Firefox and Konqueror were always OK. I still have no idea about the exploder.
The reason the Microsoft and Novell categories are so relatively huge is that is the main focus of the articles of the site. For instance, Microsoft has 51 articles and Novell 56, so they get the largest font size (now 24). In comparison, Java has only 1 article, so it gets the smallest size (6). Somewhere in the middle is a category like Patent Covenant, with 21 articles.
Hopefully, the 18px swing from smallest to largest is enough to show granularity while not overwhelming the screen…
no_name said,
December 11, 2006 at 6:17 pm
shane, thanks for Opera fix! =)
Exployter 6.0 – Looks OK
Don’t know about 7 (too afraid to install)
Draconishinobi said,
December 11, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I’ve never liked the layout of blogs, but this seems logical enough. I don’t think the font size thing helps though … it just makes it look messy IMO.
As long as they are sorted by date (month) and category and are search-able it’s fine.