My apologies for a technical glitch that kept the site offline from yesterday morning through this morning. Looks like the problem is fixed now.
Posts Tagged ‘blog mechanics’
Movable Type upgrade
Yesterday we upgraded to the current version of Movable Type from the old version we’d been running. I’ve noticed a few resulting glitches in font display, etc., and will be working to fix those over the next couple of days. Feel free to let me know about any problems you notice on the site that may be related to the switch.
Holiday posting
Posting will continue sparse through the weekend as we enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday and catch up on non-site obligations. See you in a few days.
Query on site redesign answered
At least a dozen of our readers were generous enough to reply to our query of last Friday about how to replace relative with absolute links. We’ve now solved the problem to our satisfaction. Readers’ suggestions fell into three main categories:
Query on site redesign: how to replace relative with absolute links?
In converting the site to Movable Type format, we’ve run into a problem we’d like to share with readers with HTML design experience, since we’re sure there’s a solution out there.
“Links don’t work”, update
A half dozen readers have now written in responding to our query on this problem (see Jul. 11), and we’re pretty sure we understand it now. It seems to afflict users of older browsers that cannot handle newer implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) such as those used in Movable Type.
In fact, we replicated the problem ourselves by calling up the site on an ancient Netscape 4.79 Navigator browser. Typically, in this kind of failure, the links on the main (left) column are unusable while the links on the right (blogroll, etc.) column will work as usual. Browsers of this vintage will have problems displaying many sites of recent design; for example CorpLawBlog shows the same links-don’t-work problem.
What to do? We begin with reader-side fixes: 1) upgrade to a more recent browser (we assume this is the best advice for most readers); 2) Some noncurrent browser versions (such as Opera’s) have a toggle-view switch by which users can make the links workable, though possibly at the cost of making the display look even more jumbled. 3) At Tantek ?elik’s site there is a “Toggle CSS style sheets” button which you can drag to your toolbar or favorites section, achieving the same effect (sounds promising, but we haven’t tried and can make no guarantees). 4) Another reader writes: “It’s not a major problem for me; I work around it by looking for the entry in the ‘Recent Entries’ section, where the links work.”
Then there are fixes that could be installed on our side. One brute-force method, which we don’t care for, would be to stop displaying in columns altogether, relegating the blogroll and other permanent links to the bottom beneath all the recent blog posts. Another reader suggests that we install the tantek.com “Toggle CSS style sheets” button ourselves in a visible location, which we assume would increase our page size and thus load time. A third reader suggests that we tinker with our own CSS file as follows: “Either delete ‘position:relative;’ or comment it out (replace with ‘/*position:relative;*/’).” But we’re wary of tinkering with the code unless we understand all the effects of doing so.
Right now, we’re inclined to recommend that readers try one of the reader-side methods outlined above if they have this problem, which will have the incidental benefit of making many other sites more usable as well. We’ll try to keep an open mind about the possible fixes to be done on our side, though.
“Links don’t work”
A reader writes: “On the newly designed Overlawyered.com, the links no longer work, at least they don’t every time I’ve tried to use them from my computer on the House of Representatives network. I don’t know if this is a problem on our end or yours, but I thought I might flag the issue, as not being able to link to cited articles unfortunately makes Overlawyered.com much less useful to folks on Capitol Hill.”
Any other readers or sites report this problem? We recently viewed the site with a very old browser (under Windows 95) and while Movable Type didn’t display optimally, the links did work. Any technically savvy readers know what the problem may be here, and whether there’s an easy fix for it on our end? (See update Jul. 14).
Font darkness
Thanks again to readers who wrote in on the question of how to make the font darker. The most elegant solution was the “stylesheet switching” reader option suggested by Plogs.net, but since we aren’t confident of our technical capability to implement that option smoothly, we’re falling back on what everyone else suggested, which is just to darken the font for everyone by adjusting the “blogbody” color value in Cascading Style Sheets.
Speaking of light and darkness, Virginia Postrel has a wonderful article newly online at D Monthly (“Spaces: Technocrats and Glowing Panties”, not dated; via her Dynamist blog) on how Texas regulations prescribing fluorescent rather than incandescent lighting in new commercial buildings, billed as “cost-free” by environmentalist and technocratic advocates, are in fact anything but cost-free as an aesthetic and commercial matter.
Blogging resumes Monday
Thanks to numerous readers who’ve written in with suggestions on the dark-font issue. See you Monday.
New format, cont’d
A reader writes: “Love the new format of Overlawyered.com. One request, though: I have trouble reading the light font. Would it be possible to set it darker, or as text to be defined by the user’s browser settings?” We don’t know the answer — would any technically knowledgeable reader care to suggest a fix?
Others wonder: where are the permalinks to individual items, what we used to call “Durable Links” in the old format? You’ll find them by clicking the time-of-day-posted link at the bottom of each post.