New Digs and a New Site

August 22, 2007 07:50 +0000 | Blogger Geek Stuff 13

After much lifting and hacking, I've moved moulinrouge to Melanie's house for the duration of my trip. It'll live here while I'm wandering through Europe and Korea so I can have a place to post pictures and blog :-)

As an added bonus, you may have noticed that the site is BRAND FRICKIN' NEW today. I've been coding this baby for months now on the subway, in parks, in bed and on Melanie's couch... it's nifty, it's new, and it has a bunch of kickass features:

I've created a truncated RSS feed and plugged it into Facebook. I wanted to make sure that people commented in just one place (here) and not both here and that site.
Wider format. Hope you like it. If you don't, you can shrink your window :-P
New Spammer protection. I can't say spammer-proof, but it should be enough to make it too complicated for them to bother.
New Tagging system. Blogs are now tagged dynamically so I'm no longer bound by those few categories.
Sexy new search feature. Try it out :-)
New snapshots section. Everytime I shoot something with my camera phone, I can upload it here.
New look & feel. Ok, it's not as pretty as the original, but I was in a hurry. I'll try and pretty it up more before I leave.
Fully MVC system. This is a complete rewrite using all the tricks I've picked up at Riptown.
More admin tools
Really cool backend stuff for my imager. I needed these for my trip.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'll be trying to get some sleep before dawn. Do me a favour and try to break the site eh? Leave comments, change your preferences etc. Please email me if you find anything amiss.

Comments

Scott
22 Aug 2007, 12:33 p.m. |

I question your font choices. Come over to the Calibri side.

Otherwise, I'm not a sophisticated enough webboi to be able to recognize much else. My reactions are limited to: "Oooh, shiny" and "Ehn."

Lara
22 Aug 2007, 6:16 p.m. |

I think the font stretches across the screen too far .. it's more tiring visually and also creates a horizontal scroll on the computer I'm using (and no, it's not in 800x600).

I found out what my problem was logging in .. the boxes where I was supposed to enter my name and password were WAAAAAAAAAAAY down in the bottom right corner of the page and it requires vertical and horizontal scrolling to see it.

Lara
22 Aug 2007, 6:18 p.m. |

PS: My issues might be browser related .. I'll have to check at home on Safari. But still, it's good to know. Also, I do like the new image at the top. :)

Daniel
22 Aug 2007, 6:23 p.m. |

Lara, what browser are you using at work? I didn't bother to test any of this before I put it live so I haven't even seen it in any version of Exploder yet.

smyli
23 Aug 2007, 4:41 a.m. |

hey uh... so what will your blog be called when u r back in Van? 'cause ya wont be 4349 km from home no more.

Jeanie
23 Aug 2007, 5:25 a.m. |

I've got the same problem as Laura with the login page. (Yeah, yeah I've heard the speech about "Exploder."
Also, when in "comments" the text is all nicely aligned with my screen, but there are still horizontal scrollies for the whole because the comment box is too wide. (IE it would be better if the comment box were aligned with the rest of the content on the page.

Otherwise I echo Scott's "Ohh Shiny!" and smyli's question of what you'll call your site when you're back here.
*g*

PS I think we've renamed Salem "Samwise." He's big (well compared to a teddy bear...) hairy and cuddly, is loyal and sweet, and he is most definitely ruled by his stomach. Elevensies anyone? I think it suits him.

Jeanie
23 Aug 2007, 6:44 a.m. |

Dammit... Aparently I can't close any of my parenthesis... sorry.

Lara
23 Aug 2007, 12:01 p.m. |

I use Exploder at work. We aren't allowed to use anything else.

It looks much nicer in Safari (unless you've changed it and I'm not seeing how it was), though I still think the text is too long/wide .. it looked better when it was more columny.

Daniel
23 Aug 2007, 3:39 p.m. |

I'll probably just rename the site to "Searching for Tao", though I suppose I'll make that decision when the situation presents itself.

As for the exploder issues, while I don't much care about exploder, I'll try to attend to it's shortcomings this weekend. Exploder doesn't like having boxes with 100% widths next to floating boxes (the side panel) so it's throwing up and skewing the page.

Then there's the wide screen thing. That was an intentional change though I'm not against adding in a feature to let you toggle it on & off or something. The problem comes from wanting to put wide images in my blog posts and the column being too narrow. If it set it to wider though, you end up with it not playing nice with low resolutions like you might see on my grandmother's computer.

I'll tinker, we'll see. Thanks for all the input everyone. :-)

Lara
23 Aug 2007, 4:10 p.m. |

I realize you don't like Exploder, and neither do I, but some people (your friends, natch) don't always have much of a choice. Not to mention the fact that like 90% of people who come across your site for the first time will be using Exploder. It pays to at least make it not totally painful to navigate, rather than being all "oh I don't care about you, dumbass". :P ;)

Lara
23 Aug 2007, 4:12 p.m. |

Sorry, perhaps that last post was a bit dramatic. Pretend I said it nicer. :)

Daniel
23 Aug 2007, 4:28 p.m. |

Meh. I don't hold anything back when I bitch about Exploder, why should anyone else? ;-)

The thing is, Exploder breaks all the standards, all the rules and just generally looks shittier than every other site out there. I spend 40% of my day at work sometimes fixing issues explicitly related to its inability to do what it's supposed to do so there's a serious amount of bitterness there. That bitterness carries over to my personal site where, frankly, I don't care if 90% of the world insists on using a shitty browser -- I don't write this site for them anyway.

With that said, I'll fix what I can, when I can. I don't wanna exclude any of you exploder-dependant folk :-P