Posts by Dani

11 am and I pulled another allnighter to clean up the mess. I focused on simplifying the new thread page. I thought it was a priority because, since we now rely on tags to find things, there needed to be an easy way for someone to know what tags are possibilities and what the most popular tags are. I'm pretty content with the way it turned out.

I've also been playing around with shortening the post signatures. Are they a little better? I have another idea up my sleeve.

Tags appear at the end of the thread.

Same as before, the tags that an article has been tagged with appear after the first post in the thread. A tag cloud of other "related" tags (algorithmically generated) appear at the bottom.

It works for me. It's hosted by Google via Javascript. Do you have an ad blocker by any chance that could be killing it? Either way, it's the same way we used to do search so not sure why it would stop working for you.

OK, problem fixed. :)

I'm trying desperately to see what happened. I introduced a bug somehow, somewhere, that is making these specific templates render very slowly. Fetching all the data is no problem.

signatures are way too big and prominent.

I removed member signatures a few hours ago. Do you mean the avatar/username?

Tag clouds appearing only at the far bottom are a pain, place them in the side bar instead.

They appear after the first post of the thread, as always (same as old design).

I hope everyone understands that this was your idea, not mine. I just wanted to clean up some of the outdated forums. It was you guys who suggested we migrate to the tagging system.

That being said, it's still very much a work in progress.

Ah. I select Programming, scroll waaaaaaay down to the bottom of the page and click vb.net. How, exactly, is this an improvement?

Because the link from the main category menu that you can reach from every page hasn't been added yet.

You can still get to the top level categories from the main navigation menu, such as all Software Development or all Web Development.

However, it was decided to no longer have a forum for every single individual language, as languages come and go, some are more popular than others but not necessarily more important, etc etc etc. Therefore, individual languages have been moved to tags.

For now, you can get to them by going to https://www.daniweb.com/tags/php for example ... or by clicking on the link at the bottom of one of the forum categories or from an article tagged with a specific language to get to all threads about that language.

A tag cloud of the most popular languages/tags will be added to the top navigation menu by the end of tonight, hopefully.

We removed all forums and migrated over to a tagging system.

https://www.daniweb.com/community-center/daniweb-community-feedback/area-51/threads/499937/new-forum-categories

Nono, not the new design :) The new forum structure that's currently underway.

I'll investigate. However, I'm pretty swamped at the moment completely redoing our entire forum structure. :-P

I'm sorry, I don't understand. What do you mean by making the background liquid? Encase everything in <div class="container-fluid"> and encase all of your columns in a <div class="row">

Space and distractions around the topic? I was actually thinking about it just being the signatures/avatars are too big. Heh. I know about how half of you like the whitespace and half of you don't, but what other "distractions around the actual topic" are you referring? The sidebar, etc. hasn't changed since the old version.

I think the signature is out of order. You see the post content first, then who posted it. Would I be correct in guessing that you wanted us to view posts on their merits rather than filtering by posters we trust? ;)

It was done this way for a handful of reasons. It all began because the SEO firm I hired of ex-Google employees insisted it be this way, despite me not necessarily agreeing. Then, I noticed StackOverflow does it this way. Then, my designer friend recommended it be this way as well. At this point, so many people whose UI/UX opinions I trust have got me convinced.

With the new design, are you finding discussions hard to follow? In other words, is the area with the member signatures too big that it becomes confusing or requires effort to skip over them when following message after message?

I'm getting a lot of confusion in that respect from multipole people who do not frequent DaniWeb regularly (essentially that it's "not fun to read"), and yet no one has mentioned anything as of yet in the feedback forum.

You can read SearchEngineLand, SERoundTable, ... umm, there are others, but those are my favorites for the latest news. What, specifically, do you want to be briefed about? There have been soooo many incarnations of the Panda algorithm up until this point. What makes this one different is that it's a suuuuuper slow rollout (many, many months to complete), which is unique. A lot of Panda-affected still aren't even sure if they've been able to get out of it or not yet.

Just stumbled upon this thread as a result of browsing around the new design, and just want to once again offer you a massive thank you.

That being said, I actually like that second design (of the two JC provided earlier in this thread) as one of my all time favorites (although there have been a new design every 1.5-2 years over our 15 year history.) It's special for me because I remember it was the first time that DaniWeb began to make some money from advertising and I was actually able to afford to hire a design firm ... Acromedia Inc.

Then two designs ago it was JESS3.

The rest has been all me with some amazing feedback just yesterday from my friend Mariano that I have yet to implement. :)

I've yet to hire Mariano to do a full DaniWeb redesign, but he designed our media kit a few years back and also some small images I needed at the time. He currently is the designer for BitPay.com but when I met him many years ago, he was just a freelancer with the site http://www.690design.co.uk/

Hi there and welcome to DaniWeb :)

OK fixed. It got messed up by the little degree symbol in the Location. Our parser couldn't handle it.

Why not just use the Finder menu on mobile and click the link that says "Articles Recommended for Me?"

What I mean is that I'm pretty confident that our mobile friendliness is not a huge factor in how much mobile traffic we get. Keep in mind that 95% of our traffic are passers-by from a Google search who have no idea what the mobile experience is like before clicking through. (Not many are asking programming-related questions on mobile in the first place.)

Either way, they don't know what the experience is like before they arrive. Having a mobile friendly site could be the difference in the conversion rate, bounce rate, time spent on site, etc. But not the difference between clicking through from a Google search or not. Our experience is considered optimized for mobile in Google's eyes, so we are not being filtered out of mobile Google results.

Contrast this with Dazah which gets so much mobile traffic right out of the box, even before we had mobile usability at all.

It's the nature of the audience and demographics and how they land on the site (Google search, social media, word of mouth, returning visitor, etc.) that determines how many search users we get in the first place. Then, the quality of the mobile experience determines if they stay or not.

The reality of the situation is simply that not a lot of people are performing programming related queries on their cellphones compared to from their desktops. That's never going to change until mobile phones have an efficient way to copy/paste code from your IDE. So that is …

As was mentioned yesterday, unread articles have their title highlighted in blue, so there is no need to constantly divert the eyes right and left when scanning the list.

I just so happened to have stumbled upon this thread while browsing, so I guess I need to reply! :) DaniWeb is hosted with SoftLayer.

Back when we first launched, we used a reseller account through ThePlanet.com for our dinky little shared server. Then, we grew, and expanded to a dedicated server directly through ThePlanet. Then it turned into 2 servers, then 4, then 6, then ..., and, well, you get the idea.

Then The Planet became acquired by a holding company and merged with SoftLayer under the SoftLayer brand. Then SoftLayer recently became acquired by IBM.

Honestly, I think that it was nothing but complete sheer luck that the dinky little cheap hosting company I went with for my dinky little hobby site 15 years ago is now considered one of the most reliable hosting companies out there. They definitely have their moments, but overall I'm really happy here.

Oh goodness gracious! I resubmitted the post and it looked just fine, and now it's corrupted again. I'll investigate this bug within the next day :)

I'm not sure what went wrong, but I attempted to edit the post, I copy/pasted it all into Notepad, and then copy/pasted it all back into the post editor. There must have been some type of funky character that broke the database that Notepad stripped away.

Mobile access is increasing in general - not sure about DW stats - so providing an easy-to-use experience should be a consideration.

We get virtually no mobile traffic. Perhaps not more than 2% on average. When I created a mobile skin initially, there was no increase at all, so it seems the DaniWeb audience just doesn't use the site from mobile, as a whole, regardless of what it looks like. Meanwhile that new site I created last month, Dazah, receives as much as 30% mobile right from the start.

I'll check out Primefaces tomorrow, err, today. Pulled an allnighter optimizing database queries here and it's now nearly sunrise.

Hi there and welcome.

Welcome!!

Hi there and welcome to DaniWeb :)

Forgot to update this thread saying I fixed the problem this morning.

I find this to be less functional because I scan the thread title first then with my peripheral vision I can quickly see if there is anything new in that thread.

You'll notice that if it is unread, the thread title itself is highlighted in blue for your scanning pleasure. No need to divert your eyes.

Where.s the forum list in mobile? If not there unusable in mob

Currently you can get to the entire forum list at the bottom of the homepage on mobile. You currently cannot get to the giant list from every page of the site like you can in tablet or desktop mode. It's not ideal, but it was a way of just getting it to exist by launch time. You can also use the navigation menu (accessible from every page) to pull up your list of favorite forums. And, of course, there are breadcrumbs from every forum thread leading back to its forum. Essentially, our mobile mode is the same experience as you would have in desktop mode with any forum system (vBulletin, Xenforo, etc.) out of the box.

However, one of the things I am happy with is that the tablet experience is now as fully functional as the desktop experience, which wasn't the case before.

When I click [Code] button, instead of letting this window be 100% of height, let it be like 5 rows and let it enlarge as user types/copies things in it

We had an auto-expanding editor previously, and ran into browser-specific issues that I couldn't reproduce, that was making posting a very frustrating experience. (Reverend Jim was having the issue, for example.)

On top of that, can you make it mono-spaced font? I think it would help.

Bug fixed :)

Yes, I had all the templates redesigned and ready to go, but I forgot to add the links to the footer.

Gah, I can't figure out the problem at first glance, and I really need to get to sleep. I'll check it out tomorrow.

Indeed, you are correct! I will fix :)

It is less clear what the Sticky Threads in the forum are (I just assume that the green tags 'Read me' point to Sticky Threads, since I know those two threads to be sticky, but I don't think would've immediately seen it if I hadn't known)

We haven't been calling them 'Sticky' for about 3 years. They used to just say 'Read Me' in the old layout as well, so I'm confused by your confusion. They used to say 'Read Me' in a bold and slightly smaller font. Now they look different but ...

In a thread I visited just this morning, I saw a notification top right ' :( Not yet answered', which might be a bit misleading. In fact it had been answered: the OP just hadn't marked it as 'Solved' yet.

Yes, I changed the terminology 'Solved' to 'Answered' because I thought it makes more sense that a Q&A has not yet received the A. Should I change it back? Did I just make it even more confusing?

Further more, as JWenting already noticed: In order to go to a new forum, you need to go back to the main page if you are in a subforum.

No, you don't. You just need to click the blue menu button in the top right, next to the search. I agree there is a usability issue since you're the third person in the past 2 hours to not find it without my assistance.

For right now, you can click the blue menu icon in the top right corner of the top navigation.

The reason it's hidden, in this way, is because I have a funny feeling that only DaniWeb oldtimers rely on our old navigation menu (which has been in use for 15 years).

the white margins on the left and right are rather big, costing a lot of room on screen. Make the main pane wider, so people need to scroll less.

Will probably be implemented in the near future.

Font could be a tad smaller (1-2 points), again less scrolling

Have yet to decide this one.

Posts on the main page used to show in which (sub)forum they were made in the header. Makes filtering what you want to read in detail that much easier (plus often gives context that may be important in deciding whether to click through or not).

They still do show the forum, but it is no longer the main focus. The link is now small in the quote footer.

When in a post or forum I now can't get to any other forum without going back to the main/entry page. Not userfriendly.

Yes, I will look into finding a solution to making it more user friendly. For right now, you can click the blue menu icon in the top right corner of the top navigation. You can also use the Finder menu to bring up your favorite forums.

So there are two ways.

The first way is to use the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page. So it will look something like:

Software Development / VB.NET

where both of those are links, and you can click on either to jump to the VB.NET forum, or the entire Software Development category.

The second way is by launching the forum menu, by clicking the blue menu icon at the top right next to the search.

I'm sorry, I'm confused. What page are you trying to get to? From the discussion page to the discussion thread? Huh?

Well that's saddening to hear. BTW, may I ask what your screen resolution is?

Please let me know what it is that you missed. I'm guessing it confused others as well. Will also look into repositioning the mark as solved button.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused. You were never able to vote for yourself?

Uh oh ... is the fact that you just double posted a bug?

Thanks!

So our new design is live, but it's far from complete. There were quite a handful of changes that needed to be made on the backend, and I needed everyone on the same layout before I could make changes to the code base. Otherwise, it would break the old design.

Either way, some stuff is still broken, there's still a lot to do, but please let me know feedback, and please be sure to start a new thread for each bug report. Thanks so much!! :)

As opposed to what? Do you mean all in caps with underscores as a naming convention? What else would you name it?

Yes, I use a meraki at my coworking space. I have an MR16 and an MR18.