Ideas for ILX

obv you would need to add a new style for a second menu. xp.

Indeed, but in changing from one to two rows, I can guarantee that a bunch of the stylesheets will not deal with that well.

Do you mean you've customised it to show no boards?

No, I didn't do that. I have never seen anything on that page. Are you serious, it's the most used page? It's blank for me!

Wow - something is wrong then!

Click the "Site New Answers" header - see what it says in it.

Also, just click the "restore defaults" button - see if that makes it come up with something.

haha kenan

No, sorry. my fault. I unchecked all the boards earlier in this conversation, actually, but I didn't know the difference because I have never clicked on that page.

Yeah, different people using it different ways is the truth.

I was cornfused.

you're living in the past, man! contemporize!

i'd be happy to donate some time to fixing shitty css problems caused by 2nd menu bar.

Ha - it's a good page. I like it; in fact, it's basically all I use.

Cheers, Ledge.

Kenan, don't you use your own stylesheet?!

Jesus... on this "site new answers" page that I swear I have never been to before in my ILX life, the "kenan dark" stylesheet looks like lukewarm shit. Why didn't anyone tell me?!

The links are black there, unlike on the new answers page for whatever board you're on? I feel like boiling my own shoe right now.

It'll only be like that if you've done the 'restore defaults', which actually sets everything to black. It's a bit of a bug really - it should just not put a colour on it.

wait kenan doesn't use site new answers? this is like when lex didn't know who john wayne was

Set in my ways, with the worst of them. I got used to reading one board at a time probably about 8 years ago now, and never thought to do it differently.

NOW I understand how people can so mysteriously keep up with ILE and ILM at the same time! I was always like, "Do they just constantly keep two browser windows open?"

Haha!

keith, thank you for doing all this for us.

Oh that's OK... Cheers.

The black text on the Site New Answers page is unfixable with CSS because of this:

<li><a style='color: #000000'

There's an inline style somewhere, and that'll always trump.

And yes, keith, if I haven't mentioned it in a while... you rule. :)

Yeah, the style is how it does the colouring... The bug is that 'restore defaults' should make it not put the style in at all, not make it set them all to black.

(is this how keith spends his holiday?)

lol - going to Glasgow shortly to see various ILXors and Dr. C.

welcome to site new answers, kenan, you will be able to keep up with site new nonsense better now.

Well, not too much. The stylesheet I use is almost unreadable on that page. I'm kind of glad I didn't know that before, because there's nothing I can do about it. The links are black, black forever. Black like death.

I'll fix that...

And this is the most used page? I could crawl into a hole right now. I feel like I've been walking around with a booger hanging out of my nose for the last 3 years.

Well, we just didn't want to embarrass you by saying anything.

Huh, New Questions. Interesting. I assumed that this would be a list of unanswered questions. Maybe that's how it used to be?

Keith, you are awesome.

Yeah I think buried is fine - or maybe with a simple default configuration that people can customise, but cutting them altogether likely isn't going to work.

― Keith, Tuesday, August 4, 2009 11:58 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I've kind of lost track of what specific menu bar features are getting added here, but philosophically I disagree with this. Getting the UI right is hard, and people are always going to wail and gnash when you take away their pet feature, but my experience of developing for end users is that cutting features that are either little-used, have better alternatives, or are just silly (alphabetical list of threads?!) will make your life easier in the long run, as well as making the site easier to use.

I've got a couple of different menubar mockups kicking about somewhere, will see if they're still relevant.

Keith: could sna colouring use named colours rather than values? That'd let stylesheets define them to fit in.

In Waverley. No sign of Janet Street Porter. Up to anything this afternoon? Will be in Glasgow in 45.

OK, this is maybe a dumb question, but when you're in Site New Answers, is it possible for threads you've clicked on to appear in a different color, just as it is if you were viewing a board on its own? I'm also not sure that the blue used in thread titles on blueski.css is an option on Site New Answers, but I guess I can live with that. (Basically, I want Site New Answers to visually render exactly like blueski.css.)

This works if you stop hiding sub-boards (at least with old.css).

unreg users on IRE

Jaymc, this is the thing that was so disturbing me upthread. There's an errant bit of code that makes all links on the Site New Answers page black, clicked or not clicked, style or no style, no matter what. And only on that page.

Ok, not all links -- all thread title links. Which is kind of even weirder, because every other link on the page is more prominent than the one you want to click.

Kenan, it's not as simple as that. It doesn't style them at all if you've never messed with the customisation.

Jay, yes I'll have a think, but will take a bit of work as I'll need to figure out the maths for hsb colours (to make visited links darker than whatever colour you've chosen or something like that) and so on but I thinking could do it.

Cool, thanks. That's one of the reasons I don't use Site New Answers very often.

You have more than one reason!? :)

yes, that's also my main reason (the other being that a lot of boards confuse me). In any case, thanks a lot for doing this!

hsb? u mean rgb? i'd subtract the same amount - percentage wise - about 25%? from each val. of course you'd have to split the string into the three components.

Well, only a couple of other reasons. One is that if you're following more than a few boards, older threads get bumped off the page more quickly. Another might just be a personal psychological thing -- like it just feels more orderly to look at the boards separately. I feel like I can keep track of things better. But I still use SNA from time to time, mostly to see if I've missed things on the smaller boards I don't check quite as often as ILE/ILM.

No I meant hsb - I think I am right... Doing it in rgb doesn't quite work e.g you can't make red (255-0-0) darker by any easy multiplication of the rgb numbers I think, but you can convert to hsb, reduce the 'b' and then put it back to rgb.

Sorry meant lighter not darker. Not easy this on an iPhone.

Ah okay Jay. Makes sense.

If the colors are CSS instead of hardcoded, you get the darkening for free -- just make them <A class="greenlink" or the like, and in the stylesheet specify a:link to be whatever actual color value you want. If there's no a:visited style, you'll get the browser default, but if you want to make it a darker green or w/e, then the stylesheet can do that.