I made a couple of changes to the site over the weekend:
- Softened the fonts and colors. My intent is to improve readability and attractiveness. Let me know if it has had the desired impact, no impact, or the opposite of the intended impact. (You might need to hit Refresh on your browser to see the changes.)
- I added a link near the top of the sidebar that will let you email tips to me. So, if you have a tip you think other readers would like to know about, please send it to me. My plan is take these tips (if we get any), and share them with everyone through a post. Basically, I envision a periodic post entitled something like “Readers Tips,” which would contain a few of the submitted tips.
Again, I would appreciate your feedback on the site changes. And, of course, I always welcome your tips and comments. Hopefully this new link makes it a little easier for you to participate in sharing tips.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Looks good to me. I have to enlarge the font a bit, but my eyes are pretty bad. A question - I saw your post about enabling mobile viewing - is there a special URL for mobile access? Just a curious question as I usually read you via Google Reader and they’ve just recently revamped their online apps to play nice with the iPhone and iPod Touch…
Hi capo,
Thanks for the feedback. My eyes are not the best either but a lot of folks are younger than us
[disgusting isn't it?] Depending on the feedback on fonts, I might nudge it up a little bit. Even if nobody else comments one way or the other, I may nudge the text fonts back to their original size. I didn’t realize the change I made would shrink the fonts as much as it did.
For the mobile viewing I enabled Alex King’s WP Mobile plugin. It whiffs out whether a viewer is mobile or not, and if mobile directs them to a simplified style sheet: one that strips away everything but the basics. On my BlackBerry, the site viewed fine even before enabling the plugin (in fact, it looked better without the plugin), but Windows Mobile devices need a simplified view because WM’s Internet Explorer is, how shall I say, … well, I won’t say.
As for viewing on the Touch, my hunch is that I don’t have anything in place that optimizes that viewing experience. I have seen some articles on how to craft a style sheet to support Touch and iPhones, but I am not comfortable that I could pull it off without screwing it up. Learning how to do it is on my back burner, though. If you view it via the Touch and it really looks like crap, though, please let me know and I will give it a higher priority.
No, it looks fine on the Touch, but it’s the standard page. Some sites format pages for Mobile Safari devices, but there’s usually a different URL - http://iphone.keenerliving.com or the like. You might want to keep an eye on your logs and see how many iPhone/Touch browsers are visiting. My hunch is your site might get more than the average, but probably not a significant percentage of the overall traffic.
Thanks for letting me know, capo. I will keep my eyes on the logs. A separate mobile formatting, and link, is a great idea. I’ve noticed that is what Lifehacker does, for example. Not entirely sure how to implement it, just yet, but it gives me something to learn. Thank you.
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