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New site design

[Update: As you can see I have updated MLR to the new theme. I’m pretty happy with it but welcome continuing feedback. Thanks to all that have done so!]

I’ve been fooling around with a new site design for MLR. I’m kind of bored with the old one and it has some problems with functionality. I’m looking for better readability, less reliance on plugins but more importantly, faster loading times. Studies show that users leave a site if it hasn’t loaded in 4 seconds. Load time should be at least 90% as measured by Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow.

So please check out http://mlrtest.com and let me know what you think! You can also leave test comments but they will be erased. Load time is slow there as I haven’t optimized that site.

Please leave any feedback here and thanks!

Art

79 thoughts on “New site design”

  1. Hello Art, it’s a good site design.
    However the ‘general question’ category is just to broad and difficult to navigate. My suggestion would be to bite the bullet and use a fully fledged forum form there.

    • This idea has been brought up a few times. Unfortunately there is no way (that I can find) to port the existing posts and comments to a forum format. Even if I could I can almost guarantee a lot of people would be unhappy with that format. I’m also sure there would be unforeseen problems. All in all an exhausting job to even contemplate!

  2. Hello,
    Is anyone else having difficulty viewing the libraries as they were in alphabetical order? I’m getting a search for
    m below a message ‘Clicking on the “+” or “open all” link will display all libraries under each alphabetical category.’ However the only plus I see is for a bookmark window and I’m not seeing and open all button. I’ve tried on both chrome and safari. My apologies if this had been addressed here already (didn’t see it) or I missing something simple (usually do).

    Thanks!

  3. Hi,
    I’m having problems when I search for a site and go to look at the comments, it just says comments are closed and I can’t read any.
    But when I click on a comment link from the recent comments bar, I can see all the comments.

    Thanks in advance!

    • There’s no way to scroll through all posts. With over 600 posts and 16,000 comments it would take forever (if ever) for all those pages to load. Right now I load 5 posts at a time. I’ve tried 10 at a time but it really slows things down.

      • Thanks Art, I should have phrased my question differently. In your “Get recent comments” sidebar, is there any way that I can scroll through all of the most recent comments on the site? – s

        • Basically the same answer Steve. Before anything can “scroll” it has to be loaded into the page that is displayed. To add more comments to “Get Recent Comments” would make the load times longer.

          Anyway it’s moot as comments are replies to posts so the site would have to load all the post to see all the comments. Maybe there is a plugin that does this but I have learned that more plugins = more problems!

  5. Hey Art,

    Just logged into the new website, and it said I was logged in as MartinH. I had to log out and log in as myself. Kinda weird – seems like there might be a cookie on the website or something for someone elses account maybe? Makes no sense to me but said I’d tell you.

    Looks great though 🙂

  6. Hi Blind, the last comment you made closed out the thread as it reached it’s max replies.

    On my version of Safari it runs fine. Also http://www.gtmetrix.com is a well regarded site for page load times and the MLR home page load time is 84% and 80%, 2.35 seconds. The MLR feedback thread loads at 81% and 80%, 1.90 seconds, actually faster. A real mystery.

    Please try http://mlrtest.com as I’m using the standard WordPress theme. It worked okay for Pat. I have an e-mail into the theme developer. Hopefully he’ll have an answer.

    Thanks for your patience!

      • I believe you fixed that Art. I click on your name and am responding in the respond box that appears correctly.If this reply ends up where it’s suppose to, I must’ve somehow screwed up with the response you cited.

        EDIT…yep, works fine and allows me to edit no problem.

      • “odd that you can’t reply directly to my comment”

        Fyi Art,
        I figured out why that happened. On the old site if you forgot to enter the captcha code and tried to post your response, you would get the warning to go back and enter it BUT, it remembered who you were responding to so all you had to do was enter it and you were good to go. Now with this new site, if you forget to enter the code, the site also forgets that you are responding to a particular post and will instead treat it as a new post also erasing what you had written.Even in typing this I forgot the code again and had to retype it. After swiftly kicking myself in the ass, I am now getting in the habit of entering the code first before I type a long response only to see it gone if I forget that code.

    • Try it now and see if it’s better.

      I had set the number of parent comments, per page, from 5 to 10. When you add all of the replies to each parent comment it makes for a very long page and longer load times. I re-set it back to 5 parent comments per page. Hopefully that was the problem.

      Thanks for your patience.

        • Okay on this end. Please be more specific.

          1.) Any particular thread that’s doing it more than another?

          2.) What browser are you using?

          3.) Have you tried clearing your browser cache?

          Any specifics would help.

          Thanks!

          • 1) every page does it
            2) Safari on Mac
            3) just tried that – it didn’t help

            Just to explain it better (and this is not happening on any other site I visit) when you tried to scroll or even really right now when I’m typing this reply, everything is stalling, like when a page is loading a big video file and everything stalls. Even as I type this the letters come out slowly, long after I’ve typed them. Nothing is happening in real time, in other words – there is a delay.

          • Hey Art,
            I just tried it on my neko daw as well as my laptop and they’re both behaving the same and doesn’t matter which thread I try and visit. I grab the scroll bar and very often the scroll bar either won’t move at all at first or hesitates in a very jerky way while dragging up and down.
            I also noticed that sometimes but not often, when I try and drag the scroll bar I’ll see the “not responding” prompt at the top of firefox window flash very quickly then disappear.
            It’s almost like the scroll bar needs time to catch up to the command.

  12. Hey Art,
    Just FYI, this is the message I got when trying to edit a post a minute ago…..”Fatal error: Call to a member function get_admin_option() on a non-object in /nas/wp/www/cluster-41987/munsllc/wp-content/plugins/wp-ajax-edit-comments/views/comment-editor.php on line 74″

    • The theme that drove the old layout was problematic in that it’s coding was slowing the site down and conflicting with plugins. This theme is faster and coded better with a ton of options to easily change the formatting.

      The layout now is very close the old one, just the colors are different (and they can be changed). Can you be more specific?

      Thanks

    • The big problem is converting all the existing WordPress posts and comments into a forum format. That coupled with finding how to handle the subscriptions sounds daunting, to say the least.

      • Hi Art, I like the idea for the new site. My only problem with the current site is the login situation I’m having from my work PC. Apparently your system reads each of my logins as if it were coming from different IP address. SO if I log in today and try to login tomorrow it says I’ve used up the allowable amount of times I can login (or something like that). So I usually have to wait about 2 days before I can log-in again.

        It’s probably an issue from my job’s system, but maybe the new site can fix this problem.

        • Hi guscave,

          I just checked your IP addresses and it looks like your work IPs are being assigned dynamically so every time you log in from work the last 3 digits of your IP address changes. In your case the last three are:
          72.xxx.xxx.161
          72.xxx.xxx.163
          72.xxx.xxx.105

          Your home IP seems to be always the same at 66.xxx.xxx.xx.

          The system is designed to block any username with more than 4 IP addresses. I deleted all the IP addresses so it should be fixed – for awhile. Once there are 4 different IP addresses against your user name you will have the same problem. When that happens shoot me an e-mail and I will clear them out again.

          Sorry for the hassle.

          Art

    • Gotta echo this. Going through all the comments for the different libraries is a bit cumbersome right now due to it being like a blog.

      Thanks for the site btw; very useful. 🙂

  19. Hi Art,

    Apart from the font and snow-glare, I didn’t notice any tangible difference.

    (My 2c, as always, is for a forum style setup. Easier to navigate, find comments and follow extended discussions.)

  20. Font size seems a little big in the “recent comments” section, and maybe a tiny bit big over all…. I like the font size on the original site because you don’t have to scroll as much. Looking good though!

    • I actually shrunk the font size a bit but will mess with it some more. My problem is I know enough to be dangerous. I’ve been working with the theme developer but his communication skills are a bit lacking.

  21. Since you ask Art, visually, I was going a little snow blind on that one to be honest. Could use a crayon or two but I’d would be fine with whatever you do to keep the site going.
    I know this ones been having problems.

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