It’s that time again. Believe it or not, SI’s last website design refresh went live in 2023. Maybe that seems like yesterday to you, or a hundred years ago (or, like the weird year of 2020, both at once).
Here’s an overview.
Visual Design
You’ll notice a fresh look. Color updates, font updates, graphic detail updates. That stuff.
Under the Hood
- The Drupal CMS moved to version 11. That made the next two items possible.
- We are now running on Ubuntu 26 LTS for the server, and PHP 8.5 for that piece.
- There is Lots of other new nerdy stuff that is exciting to me but probably not to anyone else.
Features
Email notifications
We are introducing a new approach. You’ll no longer have to post a comment and set a checkbox just to receive email notifications of new comments. Instead, you’ll now see a ‘Notifications’ toggle at the top of each article, filing, or forum post. Click that, and you’ll get your notification emails whenever there is a new comment other than your own.
A word of caution: this feature is working well in tests, but you’ll be the first to use it for real, so a few bugs might surface. Claude Code and I will step on them.
Quote & reply
Some of you may remember a feature we used to have that allowed you to select text in an article or a comment, click a link, and it would appear in your new comment.
It’s not only back, but seems to be a lot more solid than the version we had to mothball a few years ago.
- Articles, filings, new forum posts have the ‘quote selected’ option at the bottom of the post.
- Comments have two options at the bottom of each comment: ‘quote selected’ and ‘quote-reply.’ The latter takes you to a new page with the whole comment you’re replying to copied into your edit box. You’ll want to use that judiciously, since it can result in quotes within quotes within quotes, and so on. But you can always edit before you hit Save.
- A tip: ‘Quote selected’ can be used multiple times to add excerpts to a single comment. Select some text, click ‘quote selected.’ Select some other text, click ‘quote selected’ again, etc. They’ll stack up separately in your comment edit box.
- There’s a jump-to-comment link to the bottom left of each comment to save some scrolling if it’s a long thread.
Both the notifications and the quote/reply features are only available if you have a valid account and are logged in.
Role of AI Tools
AI had no part in writing this article (other than a quick scan for typos), but it did contribute a lot to the refresh project. I worked primarily with Claude Code but also used Gemini free version for things that were quick lookups or explanations—or for comparing responses with Claude as a way to expose errors. A few things worth noting, for those who find AI interesting:
The power of natural language:
A common barrier for mostly self-taught people like me is that the information we most need is easy to find—if you know what it’s called or know how to describe the problem in technical terms. But you if knew that, you wouldn’t be looking for this info in the first place, so it’s a catch-22. The AIs I used in this project were enormously helpful in their ability to find solutions for a guy who is not saying it right. In some cases, it isn’t even about saying it “right,” it’s just being able to say it in the most natural way.
Human: “In this block, the icons aren’t lining up with the text.”
AI: Give me a copy of the element from the dev console. I already have a copy of your CSS files.”
Human: Copy, paste.
AI: “Found it. With your permission I’ll edit this here and that there.”
Human: “That sort of half way worked.”
AI: “Do this and this and then that and tell me the output.”
Human: This, that, that, copy, paste.
AI: “We need to do this a different way. With your permission, I’ll reverse what I did before and do [other stuff] instead.”
And so it goes. Most of this is stuff I did without AI before, but hunting down the right selector to fix an alignment problem can be really frustrating, time-consuming work—and not the kind that makes you smarter by doing it, either.
A consequence for this particular redesign: A way better problem-solving workflow. In many cases I knew right away, “This is an issue I’d have to post in a forum and wait a few days for a real expert to clue me in.” But now it’s “This is one for Claude Code.” There is still a good bit of trial and error involved, and sometimes you have to tell the AI it’s barking up the wrong tree and it should look elsewhere for a solution. But the over all workflow is far less frustrating and a lot faster.
Difficulties and Impossibilities
Difficult things got easier but also formerly impossible things became possible: I have written a few very basic Drupal modules before (these are PHP code and Drupal API), but not well, and certainly not quickly. This design refresh has some fixes and enhancements I would not have been able to get to work in any amount of time without the AI coding assistance. In the past, that meant waiting for someone to get the same idea and contribute a module to the Drupal community, or trying to talk someone into it. But now, everything is on the table for the DIYer.
Wrapping up, then
It’s been a lot of fun moving the furniture around, repainting the walls, and plugging in some new appliances—while learning to use some new tools. I hope you enjoy the site and that, along the way, we continue to do each other some good.
(By the way, if there’s a feature you’d like to see added, a lot more is possible than used to be possible within my time and budget constraints. So, you can always ask!)
Discussion
Newlooks good
Nothing special to add, it's a nice clean look.
Amazing how far technology has come since we first logged on to the world wide web... that was just yesterday or else it was thirty years ago or so.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
NewThanks!
I appreciate all the work that you have put in to do this redesign. I especially like having the quote selected feature back!
NewThanks
On the technology front, the one thing that has gotten a good bit worse is security. An Ubuntu server used to need security patches once or twice a month, and it would be just a couple updates. But now it’s not unusual to see batches of security updates over a dozen, multiple days a week. Sometimes its 10 updates one day and 20 more the next day.
It only takes a couple minutes, whether it’s 1 update or 20, so that’s nice, but I’m hoping I can hand that off to a an AI eventually, just so it isn’t so constant.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
NewAaron Blumer wrote: On the…
In the short term, you are likely to see more of this rather than less. One thing many developers have noticed about AI is that it’s pretty good at finding security holes. Just as you are using it more for site development, developers are using it to find security holes they would never have seen before. And they need to do so, because those trying to break in are also using AI to find the holes…and so it goes.
I think my eyes will have to adjust to the new look, but I also like the restoration of “quote selected.”
Also noticed that the new page look is capitalizing my user ID. I guess it assumes that if you didn’t use a capital letter to start it, that was a mistake on the user’s part. :)
Dave Barnhart
NewUserID cap
Interesting. There is a lot of ‘default css’ that doesn’t necessarily make good assumptions. I suspect it’s just a css tweak. The redesign is still in a phase where every time I look at it there is some small thing going on to the to do list. But I like fixing the small stuff. (Right now, the way stuff looks on phones is not up to par yet, for example.)
A question for you and anyone else it applies to: I think I recall that you often use a browser based dark mode. Is that working OK? I thought about adding a toggle for dark mode (like Challies does, for example), but haven’t gotten to it yet. I probably will, because I sometimes prefer dark also. But it’s a lot of color finagling in the stylesheets, so… not today.
I’m also not sure I like how high-contrast the text vs. background is in the comment form. So that might see some adjustment.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
NewDark mode
Yes, I’m using dark mode on my PC Firefox, and everything looks OK (so far).
On Android, I can’t force Firefox to use dark mode for websites (websites usually select their own color scheme, and the extension I use on the PC to override that selection doesn’t work on my phone), so it’s not doing that. If you add a change to be able to select that for the SI site, that would be great. Since nearly all modern phones are now OLED, they use way less power to put black or dark pixels (none for pixels that are true black) on the screen than white. Plus, I much prefer reading white text on a dark background to the other way around with screens (vs. books). The white is much too bright, and it’s much easier on my eyes in dark mode.
Regarding contrast, I much prefer high contrast to low. I really hate sites that do grey text on white. Ugh. However, if the contrast is high, the brightness needs to be adjusted downwards to not be really “in your face” and objectionable. But that’s just me. I know many people these days really like low contrast.
Dave Barnhart