[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
Hi Art,
Is there a way to scroll through all posts from newest to old?
Thanks, Steve
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!
Gotcha! -and thanks for your patience! – s
Actually I did find a plugin that will do it but I’d have to hack into the template. After a couple of years of running this site I’ve learned to avoid hacking if I want to avoid headaches!
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 🙂
Hey Emmett and Art,
I also came to the site and found myself logged in as Emmett Cooke. Some weird cyber mixup going on… I too logged out and logged in again, and that solved the problem. Strange… 😉
/MartinH
Wow, truly bizarre. Maybe you’re cousins? 🙂 I’ll check with the developer. Must be a cookie problem.
Thanks for the heads up!
Checked into this further and it seems it might be a caching issue. As I just enabled a caching plugin yesterday that may be the reason. I just disabled it and hopefully that will fix the issue.
Thanks again for reporting that Emmett.
Hi Art
Site just got very slow and clunky, maybe related to caching plug in ?
Safari on Mac and iPad
If it ain’t one thing, it’s one thing. I’ll have to e-mail the eMember plugin developer to figure out a work around. Thanks Denis.
Just found a possible fix. Re-enabled cache so let’s see if it will work.
Not sure if my problem is same as Emmett but yesterday, I was going to log in and saw that it was already logged in by another user named “Leilasworld” I think. I didn’t jot the exact name. Anyway, I was able to eventually log back in after several attempts. Today I try to log in and got message stating in red succefully logged out (no other user name was logged in at this time). I’ll report back if there is more issue.
Thanks for the update Brian. Hopefully it will not happen again.
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!
>Please try http://mlrtest.com as I’m using the standard WordPress theme
That works fine!
Okay, thanks Blind. This falls under the heading of the best laid plans!
Hey Blind and Pat,
Just got an e-mail from the theme developer. He’s in India so there is a bit of a delay. Here’s his reply.
“I checked it on Mac safari, ff and chrome. Loads very fast without any problems.
I’m guessing its sharing buttons, your readers might have seen the cached page even after you disabled them.
Everything should be fine now.”
Please try again and see if it is indeed fixed for you.
Thanks
Art
Hey Art, the scroll bar still freezes intermittently.
Funny how the test site link you gave me earlier runs so smoothly and when I come here it seizes up.
Like I said, I can live with it if it seems we’re the only two having the problem.
I’ll keep working on it with theme developer to try and figure this out. So far only you and Blind have reported this but there may be more.
Just tried it with Internet explorer but still the same.
Still having the same problem…
Doing there too Art.
Thanks Pat, also odd that you can’t reply directly to my comment. You were having that problem with the old theme, right?
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.
Yep, you are in the right spot. 🙂
“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.
Hey Pat, could you please try the test site at mlrtest.com and see if it’s happening there?
Thanks!
Is anyone experiencing a long wait for all of the text on any given page to load, or is it just me? Scrolling stalls and jumps too.
I’m getting the scrolling stalls.I was just trying to have some mercy on Art since he was dealing with the edit problems.But yeah, same here.
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.
Still doing it…
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.
Well I’m officially stumped! I’ve tried it here on three different computers with Firefox, IE9, Chrome and Safari without any delays. Really hard to track down if I can’t duplicate it. I’ll e-mail the theme developer and see if he has an answer. Sorry for the hassle. 🙁
No problem Art. Sorry to send you on another goose chase. It’s only a mild frustration but I can live with it if need be.
Hey Pat, please try it now. I turned off the social media buttons. It sounds like something hasn’t completely loaded so maybe that’s the culprit.
Sorry Art. Still doing it exactly as I had described it.
Just tried in Firefox and it was OK, but it really crawls at a snail’s pace in Safari… I know one of the reasons you were updating the site was for faster load times, but is worse than a slow load time b/c it never eventually corrects itself like a lot of slow page loads do.
Cool Art. Looks like you figured it out. You Da Man!
This part is also an added edit to make sure it works a second time. yep
Until something else breaks!
ok, I’ll check it out and see if it………works!!!
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″
Bummer, that edit comment plugin is so problematic! I’ll try and track it down. Thanks Pat.
Just checked the test site and it’s working there, hmmmm.
Hi Pat, please try and edit a comment now. I un-installed the plugin and re-installed and now it’s working here. Weird, fingers crossed!
Much better for me Art. I like how the libraries are arranged and the page options for both libraries and replies. Yes, much better!
Best, John 🙂
Thanks John, good to hear!