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On 21/05/13 19:45, Paul Sutton wrote:
>
> A few of us have been working on a new website structure / design and
> its finally at a point where we can give everyone the URL for comments.
Hi Paul,
I think this sort of stuff works better if you tell people what you are
planning, and discuss it, in advance. I take Gordon's point and no one
has come forward to do more editing it was last discussed.
Comments below.
Simon
The site title is wrong ('user' not 'users').
It seems stats.wordpress.com is tracking our usage :( Do you really want
to use their stats? They aren't very comprehensive, then don't include
non-wordpress content, and it'll probably go down and slow the page
loads (okay they also do the gravatar stuff, and that WILL go slow the
page loads if history is anything to go by, but at least it tries to be
cached).
The server proudly claims to be powered by PHP 5.2.17, and I was feeling
behind the curve for still having Squeeze installed. Date wise the
Squeeze PHP (5.3.3) and 5.2.17 were released almost exactly the same
time, I see there is a Google project to backport fixes to 5.2, hope
someone is, as some of the bugs in PHP were fairly bad. I usually kill
the header with the expose_php option in php.ini, not that I begrudge
them the credits, but no one reads http headers usefully who doesn't
already know when PHP is in use, and so the header eats bandwidth for no
purpose. I'd kill the Apache "server:" header if they didn't make it so
damned hard, I suspect netcraft are the only people who ever read it
usefully.
The HTTP header "Link" is interesting.
Link: <http://wp.me/P3yhuu-4>; rel=shortlink
Does anyone knowing use the shortlink header, looks like a solution in
need of a problem, it could be useful if building a self healing web.
I don't like the "email me" for RSS thing either, but that one is
clearly just personal taste.
So I guess I don't like much of what Jetpack for Wordpress does. On the
other hand you can probably placate me with one or two clicks if you
agree with me.
The current mailing list archive is about 0.5GB (and I think another
0.5GB of crud to allow it to regen if/when we change the structure) and
currently part of the webserver. They currently use a .forward file,
maildrop, cron, for an archiving email address to get new posts added,
and some PHP scripts. Not sure it is too well documented, but it looked
fairly self explanatory, and the PHP code looked tightly coded to my
cursory inspection (Neil W or mhonarc). We should put this somewhere
sensible - I'm thinking /archive on a new server so as not to break URLs
would be a good idea. I can have a go at transferring it across if
someone sends me credentials.
There is some Perl for reminding folk of subscriptions, and keeping
track of members GPG keys, but not sure if that needs preserving. What
do you think?
Otherwise good work folks.
Visually I don't like:
search box - the colour blue (which resisted my immediate attempt to
locate its cause), and the cursor doesn't fit (ugly).
calendars everywhere - I recognize a date when I see it - I'd prefer a
simple "Updated:" (assuming that is what it means) rather than be left
guessing what it means with a pretty calendar icon.
The "comments closed" box can die (Might need to be preserved where the
number of comments is >0).
The social media icons (lovingly served from here - yay - not stupidly
leaking data to a zillion social networks) should be left justified.
Maybe add a simple RSS here - see RSS comment further on.
The site title is the only serif bearing font and it looks wrong as a
result.
If the two text blocks on front page are suppose to be different
font/line spacing, they need to be more different.
I hate "uncatergorized" (but am also guilty on my own blog), at least
rip out categories from sidebar till we have more than none of them.
The RSS feed pop-ups up a list of RSS readers no one uses and some of
which are dead (AFAIK).
The bottom box is some sort of promotion for the theme that takes you to
a dead and broken website. Is the theme dead already as far as original
author is concerned?
I can fix all those up easily enough if you need help, but it will mean
maintaining a fork of the theme (you've probably already forked it? And
given it a new name, or at least under version control?), which I don't
fancy volunteering for. The downside of Wordpress is you always end up
writing and maintaining PHP, even if it is only to cull the bits they
should have on a toggle.
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