Great New Look

Forum category
Thanks, Aaron and All —

Sharper Iron looks better than ever. The Foundry page is especially more convenient. Good aesthetics! Thank you for the FINE

WORK!

Discussion

Using IE 7, the banner and logo are strangely distorted on my netbook, which has a wider screen proportionally than normal PC screens. However, using Google Chrome, it looks beautiful, as I’m sure you intended. And it is still quite functional.

Really great job. The site looks and “feels” better. The updated Foundry is much easier to navigate.

My Blog: http://dearreaderblog.com

Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. ~ John Calvin

Glad you like it. The process has been very educational for me!

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.

Mike, do you have access to IE8? It’s looking good in IE8 on my test machines but I don’t think I’ve got 7 anywhere.

(Have IE6 on an old one at church though… wow… looks terrible in that!)

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.

The new design looks great in Safari, as well. Great job!

In Chrome, the new posts page has a gap at the top and I have to scroll down to see the list. My Forum Threads are on the left and advertisements on the right at the top and it is blank between those. Below those is where the posts actually show. I am viewing it in 1024 X 768.

CanJAmerican - my blog
CanJAmerican - my twitter
whitejumaycan - my youtube

[JohnBrian] In Chrome, the new posts page has a gap at the top and I have to scroll down to see the list. My Forum Threads are on the left and advertisements on the right at the top and it is blank between those. Below those is where the posts actually show. I am viewing it in 1024 X 768.
I’m not seeing that in Chrome… but I’m using the Linux version. Anybody else seeing this?

That said, It’s not ideal having the ads etc column on the right on that page. Will probably move it to the left side. Should flow a bit better.

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.

I have no problems in Mozilla or Safari. Here is my suggestion: those who are having troubles might consider taking a picture; in windows, I think you do this with the “print screen” button.
You can take a picture of what is on your screen by pressing PRINT SCREEN (PRTSC or PRTSCN on some keyboards). This is called a screen capture. You can then paste the screen capture into a document, e‑mail message, or other file. There are two types of screen captures you can take: the entire screen, or just the active window. For example, if you have three programs open at the same time, you might want a screen capture of only the active window.
You don’t think anything happened, but when you hit “print screen,” it puts a photo of whatever is on your screen into the clipboard. You cannot paste it to this discussion pane, but you can paste it to a blank Word document. It will appear in the Word document. Then email the document as a file attachment to Aaron.

"The Midrash Detective"

Great idea! Aaron, I will try IE8. I, too am experiencing the Gap in Chrome. I am forwarding pictures of both to you.

Mike D

Someone mentioned the screenshot in PC land - Macs, I think, use Command - Shift - 3 (full screen) or Command - Shift - 4 in order to take a small section of the screen (if all you need is an image, for example).

Of course, you Mac people could just repent, too… :)

Going to check it out in the IE9 Beta at some point today.

Aaron, is there a way to replace the heart icon? Something a little nicer, like a plus sign or something?

"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells

You got something against hearts, Jay? What’s not to like about hearts? Oh I get it- it’s a guy thing. Can’t have anything girly-looking on a site called “Sharper Iron”. So how about we change the Like icon to an axe, or maybe a whetstone? :p

I do have a pretty decent looking plus icon.

Shall we take a vote?

I’m not crazy about the heart icon either but the deadline arrived when it was suddenly clear that there was still no icon so… threw something in there. I’ve seen some thumbs up ones but so far not one that looks right at that size (16x16 if I remember right) and seems to match the other icons.

Note about IE 7

I can confirm now that the site doesn’t render right in ie7. This is probably due to the max# of css files bug (and ie bug). Drupal has a css condenser that will probably fix that, but you can’t edit the css while it’s compressed so… it’ll have to stay uncompressed for a few days yet (until we’re “done” tweaking)

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.

[Jay C.]

Of course, you Mac people could just repent, too… :)
I believe you have that backwards! The operative principle would be: “Broad is the road that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat, but straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it …” ;)

Dave Barnhart

Ok, I’m an idiot. What is the picture in the banner under the title Sharper Iron and heading each forum title?

Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?

It’s sort of part of an axe. I just liked the look of wood and iron together, but there isn’t room for a full blown photo there. I’m sure an artist could improve it!

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.

everything is on the left side now (Chrome) so that the new posts are back at the top!

I an not seeing anything that distinguishes NEW posts from already read posts? It shows how many posts are new on the first post, but there is not the word NEW beside those that are new. Am I missing something?

CanJAmerican - my blog
CanJAmerican - my twitter
whitejumaycan - my youtube

[JohnBrian] everything is on the left side now (Chrome) so that the new posts are back at the top!

I an not seeing anything that distinguishes NEW posts from already read posts? It shows how many posts are new on the first post, but there is not the word NEW beside those that are new. Am I missing something?
You are referring to the New Posts page? I don’t think it ever did that. It lists all comments in the last x period of time instead.

…or are you looking somewhere else?

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.

Dear Aaron Blumer,

You can test SharperIron with Adobe BrowserLab, after a free sign up with them, which allows you to view the top part of your website on a variety of old and new web browsers. Adobe says it will remain a free service for a year if you sign up by April 11, 2011.

Here is the Link:

https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html#

Love,

In Christ,

Matt

Christ Saves Sinners is my evangelistic website.

Thanks, Matt. It’s been checked in two versions of Firefox, 2 versions of Chrome, 3 versions of IE, Opera (just today), and Safari.

What we know is that IE6 can’t handle it, IE7 doesn’t handle it at the moment (but probably will when we compress the css files), and the rest are OK.

I did hear from one user with IE8 who had “Compatibility View” enabled—that makes it look like IE7 (not good). But one click to turn of Compat. View takes care of that.

So I think the rest is configuration stuff we’ll work out over the next week or so.

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.

[Aaron Blumer] You are referring to the New Posts page?
Yes, it listed the new posts and then each post that was new in an ongoing thread had the word “new” beside it’s post number. I still see the number of new posts on the first post of each thread, but the new posts no longer say “new” so that it’s not obvious which are actually new since my last login.

p.s. I like the new method of showing quotes - very cool!

CanJAmerican - my blog
CanJAmerican - my twitter
whitejumaycan - my youtube

So I’m trying the site in the IE 9 Beta, and everything looks great until you open up a forum discussion thread. I think this is probably related to the CSS issue that Aaron is talking about.

"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells

Should be looking better now. I’m not entirely sure what the difference between “new” and “updated” is, but I think that, in that context, “new” means threads you haven’t looked at yet and “updated” means threads that have new posts or changes to the original post in the thread.

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.

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but in IE 8 when I go to New Posts and then open any thread it looks really bad. Nothing is arranged correctly at the top of the page and the formatting is gone. And my Compatibility View is turned off.

-------
Greg Long, Ed.D. (SBTS)

Pastor of Adult Ministries
Grace Church, Des Moines, IA

Adjunct Instructor
School of Divinity
Liberty University

Greg, I’m not able to reproduce that one.

Is anyone else seeing it?

What happens if you hit refresh a couple of times? (Just curious… it sounds like the css is not loading in your browser… once in a while I’ve seen that happen and a refresh takes care of it)

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.

Yes, I think that is what is happening. No, refreshing the page a couple of times did not work.

-------
Greg Long, Ed.D. (SBTS)

Pastor of Adult Ministries
Grace Church, Des Moines, IA

Adjunct Instructor
School of Divinity
Liberty University

I have one other report of something very similar in IE8, though I have not been able to reproduce it in my own IE of the same version. Is it just the newposts page and links you follow from it that fail to load the styling? What you go to threads via the main forum page?

Also, how does the New Posts page itself look?

The difference could be important because the comment links on the New Posts page are constructed a bit differently from those in the Forum listings (in forum, once you get to a list of threads, you have links to pages rather than individual comments)

The New Posts page uses comment links that employ a new process for getting you to the right page for the comment. I have a feeling that whatever is breaking the styling there (for some but not others) is related to these special links. Just a hunch though.

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.

OK, that’s weird. When I logged out, everything was fine—formatting was there on every article. But when I logged in, it was back to no formatting. And it’s not just from the New Posts page—if I click any article on the front page the formatting is gone as well. I’m using IE 8.0.6001.18702

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Greg Long, Ed.D. (SBTS)

Pastor of Adult Ministries
Grace Church, Des Moines, IA

Adjunct Instructor
School of Divinity
Liberty University

That’s a big clue. I’ll chase it.

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.

[Aaron Blumer] I’m not entirely sure what the difference between “new” and “updated” is, but I think that, in that context, “new” means threads you haven’t looked at yet and “updated” means threads that have new posts or changes to the original post in the thread.
I’m seeing “new” and “updated” in the list of new posts, what is missing is the word “new” beside the post number, so that as I read down through posts I can see which are the actual new posts.

CanJAmerican - my blog
CanJAmerican - my twitter
whitejumaycan - my youtube

Greg, I was finally able to reproduce the problem—at least partly (when using comment links on the New Posts page). It goes away when we turn CSS compression on. Which is on at the moment. However, the fact that this happens only when logged on tells me there’s something wrong in how we’ve got things coded. Will have to track it down.

Anyway, now that compression is on, see if you still have this problem.

JohnBrian: about “new” in the threads. Yes, I think you’ve found “something accidentally left out.” We’ll get it back in there.

Let’s try to move discussion of tech. problems over to the http://sharperiron.org/sharperiron-forums/technical-issues-problems-com…] Known Issues thread …

Easier to this sort of thing there.

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.