Feedback on new blog layout.

[Darth]

Opened to continue feedback from previous thread.

[Phil the ex frog]

Five days in you got to wonder why nothing. Your previous invitation for feedback received a fairly clear opinion which was mostly ignored. Considering the host’s aspiration to political office the voter apathy analogy is irresistible.

However, let’s try again. The usability is friggin shit. Test after test have shown that such poor usability will loose you readers. Not just those with poor eyesight. People’s eyes tire.

You, Craig and some readers might like tiny fonts, low contrast and comment counters that float over titles in smaller screen sizes. But this favour is beside the point.

Keeping your web site difficult to read because Craig likes orange is akin to a church fitting entrance stairs too difficult for less able people because the vicar has no problem skipping. You exclude on the whim of the ill informed. It is not too fanciful to call it discrimination. Darth, you, the caretaker, should recognise the problem, tell the vicar he’s being a prat and build an accessibility ramp.

Here’s an article explaining this shit from ux researchers.

Here’s a site campaigning against this shit.

Here’s the WC3 providing tools to help stop this shit from happening.

[YouKnowMyName]

Thanks for hosting a ‘user’ feedback, though in my case considering the dossier that was aimed at my work hierarchy following my participation in CM.O.UK it should be called ‘idiot’ feedback! – your endemic JTRIG et al. ‘spam-machines’ are quite meddlesome, I had to have an interview with coffee about the ramifications of your website.

COLOR OK!
I think you could change the color each month, that’s not a big problem – tho’ some people do need high contrast according to UX guidelines, just look at the “accessibility area” of your smart-phone. There are however only 216 safe netscape colours to choose from.

USABILITY UP!
the blog has really improved threadability, I like the fact that arriving at e.g. “Disappearing Aircraft” – the first thing you see is now the most recent post, with a clear thread of who is contributing and who is timewasting. In the past one would have to start at Page One Comment One of the 5000 comments and hundreds of pages, every-time! We can still go back to P1, but its great that the server remembers where we have got to, easy for computers to do this.

ELEMENTS CLASH!
On your Mobile page, I do get a clash between Craig’s headline of his latest Post and the cartoon cartouche Number of Comments, they overlap quite a lot on an iOS screen.

RANDOM STUFF!
For the rest of your technical site, do you *have* to use DNS in the nice city of Gloucester?, why not just host them across the other side of the M5/A40? I think there are a lot of servers in that part of the world . . .(according to http://abongo.com/investigate/www.craigmurray.org.uk/dns) Have you considered to migrate from Apache to Nginx for a (possibly) smaller attack surface?

I notice that your site doesn’t work with Android 2.3.7 or IE 6 / XP or IE 8 / XP due to SSL certificate issues, (basically your use of the RFC4366 Apache extended security SSL with Server Name Indication) That’s probably OK, tho’ I do sometimes spoof my user-agent as Internet Exploder 6 on XP just for fun.

thanks, YKMN ( a lot of your ‘regulars’ know everything about me, and that was part of the experiment )

[YouKnowMyName]

Specifically checking out the Portrait/Landscape rotation on Mobile, the site works great, reflowing beautifully.

The (long) Headlines and the comments cartouche quite often clash, for example “Philip Hammond, the World’s Sleaziest Man and the U193Clotmimaente Corrupt and Undemocratic British State” is how I read it on iOS9.3 in Safari Landscape.

whilst in iOS9.3 in Safari Portrait we get “Philip Hammond, the World’s Sleaziest Man and the Ultimate Corrupt and U193nCdommentsmocratic British State”

“Thoughts for Easter” {516 comments} reads the same in both portrait/Landscape

I tested also in Chrome Browser v49.0.2623.73 on iOS9.3 and the Headline/comments still clash but only in Portrait, they are all (mostly) perfectly positioned in Landscape (oops, except for the very long Philip Hammond title where again they take out ‘Ultimate’)

[YouKnowMyName]

I do like that you supplied the high-res mobile favicon/touch-icon-whatever on my iOS, I now get to take my own bookmark pic of Craig with me on my device. I suppose I had better delete it when I travel back to the ‘stans

[YouKnowMyName]

for the ‘color’ readability of the Craig website on e.g. iOS Mobile,

I have used the simple iOS ‘hack’ of Settings/General/Accessibility/Accessibility Shortcut – selected – “Invert Colors”

this gives an instant inversion of the device color-scheme when the Home button is simply triple-clicked.

I therefore get to see CraigMurray.org.uk in BLACK BACKGROUND with WHITE TEXT with BLUE HEADLINES & LINKS

this is very restful at night or early in the morning when the 5.30AM Radio4 emit a chunk of naked propaganda as they are sometimes wont to do that early. . .

[Darth]

All the feedback was put to Craig and, with the exception of some minor matters, he is perfectly happy with it as it is now. If you wish to persuade him to change his mind then please use the contact form.

[Darth]

We’re aware of the comment bubble and the title clashing especially on smaller devices. It should get fixed at some point.

The DNS is with the domain registrar. We did use the service provider DNS previously but switched to overcome a stale nameserver supplying outdated info. Never been a good reason to switch back.

[Darth]

Comment bubble reduced in size for now. That mostly seems to solve the overlap problem although there is still slight overlap with some longer titles.

[YouKnowMyName]

OK, thanks Darth, the new comments blob in Title does mostly work on my iDevice just as you say, a smidgeon clash. I did prefer the old cartouche to the new bubbles. I know the future will be entirely mobile, eventually, but your server logs will show the breakdown of desktop vs handheld access, and you can code accordingly responsively.

One big future improvement on Blog-Mobile might be to always have the full tool-set of simple-html effects available – just above the “Comment” box, the [b] [i] [link] [b-quote] etc, on all the Blog Posts? Not just this Feedback corner? reading Craig’s Blog on Mobile is one thing, but trying to compose valid W3C HTML as part of a comment whilst travelling on a train with one hand holding the bags is another thing! Yes, I’ve done this, occasionally, at the peak of the 2014 information war, where rapid rebuttal and quoting of independent, earnest & open sources seemed the right thing to do for Free-Speech at the time.

One of my test iDevices has the ~102mm diagonal screen, (Apple trick the iP5xx users by having a resolution of 640 x 1136 internally but then shrink the displayed image into half that, making the pixel-doubled ‘retina’ display super-sharp)
according to http://www.kylejlarson.com/blog/iphone-6-screen-size-web-design-tips/

With the low-key launch of the latest Special Edition small-screen yesterday it seems there will be small screens around for a while. I read recently that the initial reasons for having large screen smartphones was purely to be able to bundle a big battery behind the screen, to cope with early android power demands, but now consumers like the screen-estate

[Darth]

Allowed html is supposed to be displayed on main post comments. Haven’t figured out yet why it is not displaying but once I do it will be back.

Prior to new theme 70% of blog views were from desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) and 30% phones or tablets. Since changeover this has become 60% desktop, 40% phone/tablet. The big change was in phone readership which increased from 13% to almost 23%. The top 3 visitor days in March all occurred post switchover and we have not lost any readers. Some regular visitors have switched to mainly reading on phone but also the number of visitors on phones has increased coming in from both google and social media now that the site is no longer classed as small-screen unfriendly.

[Ba’al Zevul]

Re link text colour (mentioned earlier)…

http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-04-12

Let that be the final word!

[Phil the ex frog]

Oh dear Darth. This is you: “I’ve spoken to the vicar and he’s perfectly happy to exclude cripples. So pray to him.” Well sort of. If we can stretch the analogy way too far.

You do work for free. You are allowed an opinion. Craig has been (very) wrong before.

[Laguerre]

I can no longer access the site from the computers that I have that run Windows XP. That a feature of the new security?

[Laguerre]

I see you’ve tackled this elsewhere.

[Darth]

A restriction in Cloudflare CDN. Which browser? Firefox on XP should be okay. Probably Chrome.

[cyan]

Please get over the novelty and fix the yellow text sometime.

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Apart from this everything else is awesome, but its not a subtle flaw.

[Author]

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