New theme planned for the blog and possible use of CDN

[Darth]

This current WordPress blog theme is quite old and it is getting harder to keep it working with each new release of WordPress. We’ve been looking for a while at alternative modern “responsive” (auto resizes for mobile devices etc.) themes but recent issues may force us to have to change at short notice. Google is already down-ranking the site in some mobile search results but that’s just one issue.

Now don’t worry – all the posts and your valued comments will stay, nothing is going. it’s just the page layout will change. We may run some brief tests of some new themes we are experimenting with on the live site to see how they perform under our normal traffic load. So don’t worry if the site looks “weird” for a bit. Basic functionality including the ability to comment should be maintained at all times.

If anyone has any input or happens to be a good WordPress Theme/php coder then we are open to offers of help! Similarly if you have advice or questions, please comment here.

A related issue is that we are likely to test the blog out with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to increase our capacity. Again any queries or suggestions then please give us feedback here.

Thanks for reading.

[Darth]

Funny you should mention TOR. We were all set to test with Cloudflare when a fight broke out between them and TOR developers. Cloudflare served sites had suddenly started blocking TOR or giving never ending captchas. So the test was put on hold. May be resolved by now.

Google search results due to non mobile friendly theme is one of the least of our problems with the theme to be honest and we hope to kill several birds with one (or two) stones. No real birds harmed during the course of the comment 🙂

[Darth]

Another amusing fact is that ddos for hire websites are usually signed up with a major CDN partner such as Cloudflare themselves to prevent return attacks against them. How cosy…

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Darth.

[Ba’al Zevul]

Whoever put this forum up – well done! And thanks!

YKMN – I had the Captcha endless-loop syndrome myself last week. Turned out that someone had hacked the site, placed a nasty little Javascript (connecting to a well-known Ukrainian black hat’s IP) in an authentic-looking box, and was looking for my logon password until I realised what was going on. Fortunately it was a slow Internet connection, and I noticed the activity before he’d had too many tries, as well as the fact that I was unable to register to the site. I’d had to disable NoScript to access the genuine Captcha script, of course. Word to the wise.

[Phil the ex frog]

“ddos for hire websites are usually signed up with a major CDN partner”

Ah, a good old protection racket.

[Darth]

Even google make it too easy

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=web+booter

[Pan]

Re ‘new look’ – I’m finding it VERY hard on the eyes.

I prefer good old-fashioned legibility to the latest fad in web design.

[Darth]

Could you be a bit more specific? What bits are particularly hard to read? Happy to take any suggested changes to make it better.

[Phil the ex frog]

The new theme is a fine responsive layout. But I have to agree with Pan about it being demanding to read. The orange and light grey font colours do not contrast enough with th background colours. Small orange font (such as breadcrumbs) make my old eyes squint.

[Phil the ex frog]

Orange links in text are hard to read. Which is a real pain that needs remedying. Just change the orange to something bolder.

[Pan]

Thank you for asking, Darth.

I believe the main problem is the lightweight sans-serif font (the current fad) being overwhelmed by too much transmissive white space.

The retina is being bombarded by white pixels and is receiving very little in the way of visual ‘cues’ from the poorly designed font.

I recommend checking out Matthew Butterick on the subject. His own fonts are masterpieces as regards on-sreen legibility.

[Alcyone (Simple: Truth, Goodness, Beauty)]

Agree with Phil.

Miss the aesthetics and elegance of the old site, although Craig doesn’t seem to have aged much! We are all vain!!!

[Ba’al Zevul]

@ Darth –

1. Re Blair/An Apology: Yes please, and thanks for asking. “Blairmiles”?
2. I can see where Pan’s coming from. Or rather, I can’t when my aging eyes are tired. A larger, bolder font would certainly be an improvement. Otherwise it is very clear and clean. I like it.

[nevermind……..]

I also agree with Pan, its hard on the eyes the contrast is harder to assert with all the white.

But my hat off for the changes, well done and thanks, an edit button planned at any time? some people do like to provide grammatically pristine copies (not moire).

[Good In Parts]

Re the Al Hilli thread – the current page number seems to have changed from 61 to 203 which breaks bookmarks – selecting a saved link takes you to a different page, which does not contain the comment, rather than using the comment number to recalculate the ‘new’ page number.

I appreciate that the number of comments per page may need to change, so is there a way to go directly to a post via the comment number?

Pan has made the font readability points better than I could. Generally sans-serif is much better for me than ‘noisy fonts’ – but in this case the size, weight and whitespace area seem to combine to make me snowblind!

Not a dig at you but these days web pages seem to be carrying a lot of excess baggage compared to actual content – just look at the source of this one. By inspection I would estimate a 10 to 1 ratio with all the js files included. I do appreciate that resizing for mobile devices adds somewhat to the size.

How about keeping the home page as-is but strip out all the under-used links from the comment pages? That should halve the page size.

I have very little understanding of WP but is there a cut down, purely HTML, theme? Again I am probably talking out of my hat but I thought I read that HTML5 was supposed to be able to do most of the fancy fades without having to resort to javascript.

Thank you for your efforts to keep this site working and accessible.

[Darth]

We’ve upped the font size a bit on the blog pages. Font’s themselves are easily changeable and may be tinkered with based on feedback. Colour scheme is based on Craig’s guidance.

Sadly we can’t do much about comment links. If we’d kept 100 top level comments per page, by the time threaded replies were added the page would be ridiculously long. Displaying 100 comments/threads is also fairly cpu intensive.

Why WordPress doesn’t have a comment permalink that doesn’t include the page number is beyond me.

[Darth]

Another bit of feedback we’re looking for. Has anyone tried the site on a phone or a tablet and how does it look there? Can you try rotating the phone/tablet to get both portrait and landscape views?

We’ll experiment with fonts on the test site and try out some other tweaks. Also any comment on the “sticky” page header – is that fine or should we unstick it so it scrolls off the top of the page like any other content?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Darth.

[Good In Parts]

Darth

“Why WordPress doesn’t have a comment permalink that doesn’t include the page number is beyond me.”

Strangely the posts on this page do have permalinks that do not include the page number. Your post above at 16:24 has two elements in the header, firstly “REPLY” and just to the right of this #33238 which has the following code:-

#33239

However back on the Al Hilli page the post headers only have the “REPLY” button (with a different icon). My first guess would be that this was an artefact of the upgrade but since, in my very limited understanding, the pages are dynamicly generated and the post number is known it should be possible to generate the permalink on the fly even if it were not stored.

Please, please, unstick the page header. I have to increase the font size to read, then narrow the window to reduce the amount of whitespace. This then folds the page header and it ends up occupying a good quarter of the visible page area.

Thanks.

[Darth]

Page header now unstuck.

[Phil the ex frog]

Here’s a quick script to make this more readable. It uses CSS to reduce layout duplication and increase text/link contrast. For firefox/iceweasel users only.

-install Greasemonkey
-click “New User Script”, paste in the below and click “Save”:

// ==UserScript==
// @name CM CSS
// @namespace http://cm.nil
// @description Quick CSS fixes for CM blog
// @include https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/*
// @version 1
// @grant GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==

GM_addStyle(“body { color: black; !important }”);
GM_addStyle(“a { color: #992600; !important }”);
GM_addStyle(“a:hover { color: #cc3300; !important }”);
GM_addStyle(“div.tc-hot-crumble { display: none; !important }”);
GM_addStyle(“.featurette-divider {display: none; !important}”);
GM_addStyle(“.navbar-wrapper .navbar h2.site-description {display: none; !important}”);
GM_addStyle(“aside#text-10 {display: none; !important}”);
GM_addStyle(“.entry-meta {font-size: 14px; !important}”);

[Darth]

Or I could just paste it appropriately modified into the site style sheet 🙂

Seriously we’ve had some suggested css sent in already and are open to any suggestions anyone else fancies posting.

It’s a pity WordPress doesn’t support multiple themes/skins to be active at one time. Users could then pick the one they want. WordPress Customizer seems to be moving in that direction and has even more added stuff in upcoming WP 4.5 to allow Admins to play with alternative themes without making them live. I do wonder if an eventual goal of multiple available themes is at the back of their minds.

[Pan]

Was going to second Good In Parts’ request to “Please, please, unstick the page header”

Then saw Darth’s comment “Page header now unstuck.” Thank heavens for that!

Sticky page headers are a total nightmare on widescreen monitors, especially small laptop ones – so much screen ‘real estate’ is lost. The ‘bouncing up and down’ thing that happens while scrolling is also extremely irritating; it might be more accurate to refer to them as ‘semi-sticky’ headers, because they DON’T stay completely still!

I appreciate it must be a bit of a nightmare these days to design web pages that look good and function well on all the various devices people use now. I would venture to say that that is actually an impossible task – there are too many compromises involved, whichever way you approach it.

My personal viewpoint is that, wherever serious exchange of information and ideas is involved, the emphasis should be on readability – in other words, please do not make things hard for people who are READERS.

I suspect most web designers are somewhat younger than many of the end-users for whom they are designing. Young eyes can read anything, even something as atrocious and challenging as 6pt Arial. Older eyes can’t (at least, without a good magnifying glass)!

One other fact I would like to point out is that the old typographic rule of using sans-serif fonts for computer screens (as distinct from using serif fonts for printed text) no longer really applies.

Apart from the (in my view, very unfortunate) fashion/trend for ‘minimalist’ sans-serif fonts even, very inappropriately, for printed documents, the fact is that sans-serif fonts made text more readable on old low-definition CRT and LCD monitors – there simply wasn’t good enough screen definition to reproduce the actual serifs.

(Serifs add important visual cues for the eye/brain system to much more easily (and hence, quickly and accurately) read text, but on low-definition monitors they can actually have a ‘muddling’ or ‘blurring’ effect).

Modern monitors (even mobile devices, but especially ‘proper’ PC/laptop monitors) now have very good definition – plenty good enough to accurately reproduce those wonderfully helpful serifs.

One final point concerning modern monitors (on all devices) … most of us now (soon to be all of us) are NOT looking at LCD screens, but LED-backlit screens. These are MUCH brighter than before, which is why large expanses of white space are so tiring on the eyes – it’s like having a bright light shone directly in your eyes. Actually it’s not LIKE having a bright light shone directly in your eyes, it is LITERALLY having a bright light shone directly in your eyes!

Add to that the fact that factory-default monitor settings are ALWAYS wrong, and nobody except photographers and others concerned (professionally or otherwise) with accurate colour reproduction ‘colour-profile’ their monitors (using a hardware colorimeter such as the X-Rite i1Display Pro together with accompanying profiling software) and you have yet another battle that the poor old human eye has to fight – the ineveitable overly-bright, bluish-tinged colour cast produced by unprofiled monitors (blue being the most physically aggressive ‘tinge’ out there, as opposed to a ‘warmer’ tinge like yellow).

Hope some of the above helps, or is of interest.

[Pan]

Go here to learn more about fonts:

http://practicaltypography.com/

[Pan]

Darth, I’m sorry to appear to be constantly emphasising the negative, but…

Orange on white JUST DOESN’T WORK! (Not enough contrast for one thing, and the traditional blue hyperlinks work great and everyone is used to them.

There’s an old saying – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

[Pan]

I should NOT be taking it for granted that everyone knows “sans” is the French word for “without”.

Plus – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif

[Author]

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