I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the new web site doesn’t seem to work properly under Firefox without Flash.

Bummer.

Don’t hate to be the bearer of bad news, we’re working to resolve these issues, so please let us know of anything you see, don’t see, or would like to have. We’re listening. :)

What exactly are you having problems with without Flash?

Jordan

Looks like you’ve cleared a lot of them up.

A lot of the text is still hard to read—especially the light gray on white. I can barely see the “Formatting Help” to the right of this box. Black on white is the “standard” for most dead tree publications for a reason.

The semantics of the comment formatting seem a bit arcane. Why not use BBCODE or straight HTML markup? Is there a “preview” button I’m not seeing?

By the way, the best comment formatter I’ve ever seen is the one at Adam Felber’s site http://fanaticalapathy.com/. It shows you your formatting on the fly. I wish everyone would use it.

Some things don’t appear unless you “mouse” over them. The EDIT/DELETE links to the right of the title, for instance.

The default font size is awfully small and difficult to read. Upping that a couple of points would be helpful. Things tend to mush out if you’ve got antialiased fonts turned on. Of course, Helvetica sucks (or is it Arial?) but that’s probably just me.

I admit I’m probably a couple of standard deviations from the mean in my choice of platform (Firefox on a system running FreeBSD—talk about Nerd Central), so take my comments for what they’re worth.

Under Flash, the main page “twitches” a lot with the menu disappearing and reappearing. I find that annoying but I also hate the HTML blink tag, so, again, take that for what it’s worth.

Good job in general, though. Looks like it’s coming together nicely.

Now if you can just get Mr Shearer to update some of the content (yes, I do realize that the virtual LeShowDome is trapezoidal in shape. Has been for about the last ten years. . .) and let his fans know when and where he’s going to be appearing more than 48 hours in advance (when he does at all), that’d be just ultraspiffy.

Are you speaking specifically of the Message Board or in general?

I have noticed quite a few issues with the Board… we probably haven’t given it all the attention it needs. But we take an iteration approach, get it out there, get feedback, adjust, and repeat the cycle… until ALMOST everyone is happy.

We are pretty happy with the nav… is there anything in particular that “twitches” because we aren’t seeing it.

Where are you noticing the font size and color issues? The formatting is based off of Textile which is becoming more and more common. If you are familiar with Ruby on Rails, you’ve probably used textile. You can learn more about it at http://textism.com.

We are doing daily updates… so any feedback you have is appreciated! Thanks a lot!

Jordan

Are you speaking specifically of the Message Board or in general?

Mostly about the Message Board at the moment.

It works pretty well but, as I mentioned, the default font size seems a little small—I’d guess it’s about 6 point, which is okay for real estate contracts but a little hard on the eyes, otherwise.

There are two sets of issues: the Flash main page menu appears and disappears as you mouse around. That’s what I meant about twitching. The drop down menus are also slightly non-intuitive and sometimes I get unexpected results—a different page than I wanted. It’s not repeatable so I may just be clicking in the wrong place or right on the interface between items.

The font size and color issues are mostly manifested on the Message Board pages. You should have my email address from the signup. It’s correct, not a mailinator.com address. If you want to drop me an email, I’ll grab some screen shots and send them back to you. This may make more sense than me trying to describe what I see.

I’ve not used Ruby on Rails. I’m somewhat familiar with Ruby since it’s used by FreeBSD’s portupgrade utility and I’ve had to dink with it a little. I do have some web site maintenance experience. I maintain content on a few sites for the IEEE Computer Society—and speak fairly fluent HTML but haven’t done a lot of client side scripting.

By the way, the formatter interprets a hyphen as the beginning and the end of a “strike out” section. This is something of a pain.

Another usability item: Once you get into the Message Board, there’s no obvious way to get out or back to the “home” page without using the “Back” button.

Thanks!

All very good comments We’ll take a look at these… thanks! The strikeout I think as kinda of a nice good feature. I guess some of us are just used to textile.

The strikeout is like my least er… – least – favorite textile feature.

new site looks cool, y’all. keep up the good work.

Thanks! There should be some bigger changes this week in regards to the internal pages to the site… news, projects, contact, and so on. Also, we are working hard to get the playlists back into the site, as well as make this site something you can check on a regular basis for updates, since we are “listening” to many of the sites and areas that Harry participates in, (le show on KCRW, Huffington Posts by Harry, his Whats new section, events and found objects) You should be able to see these updates from the home page in near real time. I think we are checking them every 2 minutes or so. That makes it easier and there is no need to go to all those sites just to see if there is something new.

Jordan & The Squad

A couple more things:

The Events page is announcing an event which has already taken place—in October of 2006! Can someone please put a gun to Mr Shearer’s publicist’s head and get them to post things before they happen so loyal fans can actually plan to attend events? Pleeeeeeeaaasse.

The blog link is not picking up Mr Shearer’s two most recent posts at the HuffPo. Methinks something is broken in Cronjob land.

Thanks! Yeah we’ve been doing the updates manually for the most part so we can get a feel for a few things. We’d just like to make sure its 100% before entering cron-job land.

The Event was actually an old event listed on the previous site. The events section will also be an archive of events…. I guess we might want to also include the weekly le Show on there? Not sure if that should go there or not yet.

Is this Steve Mack Btw?

Is this Steve Mack Btw?

Nope. An entirely different Steve. I’m the same Steve that posts a lot of comments over on the HuffPo in Mr Shearer’s blog.

Website works well on browsers from both PC and Mac, well done to all!

Thanks. There are still quite a few updates to be had though. Playlists are here now though.

We had a developer go on Medical Leave for 30 days… so that put a bit of a kink in things.. but we’re back in action and making some progress.

We appreciate all the feedback! Thanks.

Steve,

Would you be willing for the time being to let me know when Huffington post gets udpated? That way I can easily update it on his site.

Let me know if you’d be interested.

Jordan

Would you be willing for the time being to let me know when Huffington post gets udpated? That way I can easily update it on his site.

I guess. How do you want to do this?

The latest is Thanks for the Lip Service

It was posted June 19, 2007.

By the way, I suppose I’ll get used to it but this textism seems rather nonintuitive to me. Maybe it’s just that I’m used to HTML and/or BBCode.

You could just email me jordan.dobson[at]madebysquad.com and I’ll update it.

Yeah we can’t change the style of writing.. but the benefits of using textile is that even without being transformed into HTML the formatting gives a similar treatment to what you’d see with a HTML treatment… so its not just code. Maybe if you think of it that way.. that might help.

You could send your textile in an email and it would have a similar feel.

What became of Steve Mack? Apparently he’s no longer employed by Harry for site work?

He gracefully stepped down. He’s still helping out here and there to make the website transition smooth.

ORANGE on white?

Are you absolutely certain?

Is this an effort to appeal to a younger demographic, or are Harry and Judith heavily invested in optometric supplies?

Haha. Can’t please everyone I guess.

Hey he picked out the orange suit… and we just followed suit.

How do you guys like this message board? This is the first time using it for us, and we’re really happy with it.

I like the simplicity of the message board…. * nods *