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HAIF-HD Upgrade


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  • Figured out how to move the user drop-down menu to the left side, freeing up space underneath the 300x250 ad.
  • Moved the rest of the forum up 90 pixels, conserving space.

After and before:

post-1-12468526569712_thumb.jpg

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Editor - All the changes you've mentioned involving the user pulldown menu, I'm still not seeing.

Also.. my profile/pulldown is on the upper right still.. as well, I've never had the HAIF-HD banner at the top of my page.. only the IPboard banner. HAIF banner is only visible when I'm not signed in..

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  • View New Content is now accessible from the New tab, next to Traffic. Please test this.

Tested and it works. Figured I'd just click on the subject line and it would take me there, and it did!

Thanks Ed!

PS:

how about an App for Android when you have time?

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I will miss the old look. I don't know about this new one but you surely have put a lot into it. The old look with less razzmatazz makes it easy for me to HAIF at work without much attention. Can the HAIF|HD billboard be reduced a little? And can we get the Tahoma font back please?

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  • Fixed an error in user groups.

Did we have to lose the .ORG in order to get the .COM ? Can the site not function on BOTH webs? If it takes two servers then I understand. I was just wondering, since everyone seems to be so worried about traffic to the site.

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  • Reduced some font sizes ever-so-slightly to help people with smaller screens.
  • Returned quotation boxes to HAIFy blue from green.
  • Reduced the size of the author margin on the left of threads to conserve screen real estate.
  • Added Twitter as a contact method in your user profile.

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Fighting the battle against unnecessary white space since not everyone has a 30 inch monitor.

  • Reduced author info margins
  • Reduced post block h3 margins
  • Reduced full page margins
  • Increased useable horizontal message space.
  • Reduced post date and time margins.
  • Reduced post margins and line height.

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Fighting the battle against unnecessary white space since not everyone has a 30 inch monitor.

  • Reduced author info margins
  • Reduced post block h3 margins
  • Reduced full page margins
  • Increased useable horizontal message space.
  • Reduced post date and time margins.
  • Reduced post margins and line height.

Looking better.

Still a huge gap between the banner and menu bar on my end.

20 inch screen here.

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Well, it was a long Sunday and Monday morning of tinkering, but I got most of the bug fixes and other items marked off of my list. There are still a few more to go, but they'll have to wait a little bit.

Now I'm going to start at the beginning of this thread and address each of your concerns and suggestions individually.

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Is the 'View New Posts' key replaced by the list of new topics on the upper right hand side?

View New Posts has been returned to its former functionality. It is now available from both the New tab in the navigation bar and from the View New Content item in the user drop-down menu.

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It's not that I don't appreciate the extraordinary amount of effort that you've put into this, but the new design aesthetic doesn't feel right to me.

It brings to mind a post that subdude made a while back that was critical of a design trend towards "bloated" consumer goods. Specifically, I recall that he made a comparison between a blocky, compact 1970's-era cloth-upholstered sofa and a cushy, bloated modern leather sofa that looks like it has the capacity to swallow you whole. That's immediately what came to mind when I logged on after this update.

Again, though, I do appreciate what you're trying to do and all the effort.

The old HAIF style felt a little Playskool, a little Lego, a little dated to me. Since this was going to be a big upgrade that I knew would take a week or so to shake out, I thought I'd stretch my creativity a little bit and see what I was capable of.

It's not the old HAIF, but really it's not all that different.

I understand what you mean about it feeling bloated. It feels top heavy. Probably because of the graphic that's currently in the header. It's funny how web sites can have a "feel" from one to the other, even if they're running essentially the same software and providing the same content. I'm not a graphic designer, so I don't understand what makes things feel a certain way, but I bet there are tons of books on it.

Hopefully in time, this overstuffed sofa will start to feel as comfortable as the old one.

One of my goals is to make HAIF as Houston-specific as possible. I'm going to bring back the Houston-themed icons when I get a chance. You've probably already noticed that Houston skylines in the section headers. The Esperson Buildings mark the current active tab. And of course, there's that massive Houston skyline behind the HAIF-HD logo at the top of the page.

The reason that graphic is so large is because of that desire to immediately let people know this web site is all about Houston. There are thousands of web sites running this forum software. Most of them look alike. Ours should be different and we should be proud of that difference.

I moved the graphic from the regular logo banner into a larger format simply because it's hard to showcase Houston in a space just 68 pixels high. Though it looks visually significantly larger, the distance from the top of the page to the navigation isn't that different from the old HAIF.

In the old HAIF much of that was dead space taken up by a field of light blue. In this new HAIF design it's being used to display a picture of the city's skyline. I know whitespace is important, but I like the idea of showing off the city a little bit more than in a 300x68 box.

Oh, and by the way -- HAIF-HD isn't an official name or anything. I'm just being cheeky about the whole TV switch to digital thing. It'll go back to plain old "HAIF" the next time I change the background.

There aren't any more ads on HAIF than before. In fact, the box ad that you see now is smaller than the old one. The old one was variable between 300x250 and 336x280. The new one is fixed at the smaller size.

The distance from the top of the page to the breadcrumb bar (the thing that goes HAIF > Skyscrapers > SomeCrappyPost) in the old HAIF was 387 pixels. In the new HAIF it's 408 pixels. So, though the new HAIF looks much top-heavier than the old one, it's only an extra 21 pixels tall.

Of course, it's far more visually compelling. But even though there are more images, load times shouldn't be impacted all that much. That's because the code that assembles the HAIF pages in your browser has been super optimized. The overall weight of the page is larger because there's a lot of Javascript stuff going on, but that's all text which is compressed by my server on the way out and decompressed by your computer when it gets to your browser so even if it's an extra 10k, only three or four k move down the intertubes.

Most people shouldn't notice any change in speed. That's because only 2% of our visitors are on dialup. Here's how things break down with the HAIF visitors over the last month:

  • Cable: 33%
  • DSL: 28%
  • Dialup: 1.82%

The rest is people on corporate networks, T1 lines, OC3 connections and such.

I think the reason the top of HAIF looks so much larger than 21 pixels is because of the lens flare and the bold logo. This will change over time, as it always has,to feature different scenes of Houston. Most should be more pastoral than what you see now, and will be visually easier on the eyes. But since we're rolling out a whole new HAIF, I wanted to do something splashy to celebrate.

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Yeah, my first inclination is to agree with Niche. I think some of the promised functionality sounds promising, but the design and interface so far just feels... bloated. Good word for it. I surf a lot on my netbook and the netbook is fighting back this morning, I think because of all of the graphics.

It's probably the Javascript rather than the graphics.

I've just taken out a couple of bits that aren't completely necessary. Hopefully that will speed things up a little bit for you.

I haven't tested HAIF on my wife's netbook yet, but I will when I get home.

And cluttered, too. Lots of pictures and content but it's just kind of scattershot and hard to read, actually. I'm not sure how much of that is just being unfamiliar with it and how much is actual preference for the old style.

I think part of it is the way we're expecting certain things to be in certain places. But I've cleaned things up a little. Dropped some unnecessary links and moved others into the user drop-down menu to declutter the space. It's all a work in progress.

Definitely going to keep an open mind, though.

That's all I ask.

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Done.

This is a pet peeve of mine.

Personally, I don't like it when it opens a new window, because what if I don't want it to open a new window? I have no choice.

However, if the current window simply goes to the website of the link, then I have the option of opening a new window and/or tab.

I'll live though.

edit: this was in response to someone wanting a link to open up in a new window/tab.

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When i go to View New Content, it lists 18k posts. I thought it might move down to a more accurate number the second time I used this function. , but it didn't.

The New Content should work the way you expect it now.

I do have questions, though:

  • Under the old style, I could View New Posts, then click the icon next to the title, and it would take me to the first unread post in the topic. I don't see that now (the folder icon next to the title doesn't seem to do anything). Will this feature be turned back on? It's very convenient!
  • The HAIF HD screen (http://www.houstonar.../haif/index.php?) has too much going on at the top, the pictures and text are just too big and too spaced out, IMO. It takes up practially the entire first screen, and I feel like many visitors will see this and never scroll down to the actual content.
  • I haven't tried accessing this on our iPhone or Bold, so hopefully the larger text will format properly on those tiny screens, LOL.

  • You're right -- the little folder icons don't seem to do anything anymore. Strange. But clicking the thread title should take you to the first unread post in that thread.
  • The HAIF-HD header has been trimmed down by more than 150 pixels since you wrote that. It's now just 21 pixels larger than the old HAIF.
  • The mobile version works well, but I've found a way to make it a little better. I don't have a Blackberry to test with, though (Anyone want to lend me one for a week? I'll pay FedEx shipping both ways).

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The interface is pretty bloated. It screams HAIF HD in large, huge letters across the screen.

That's a feature, not a bug.

And I thought Houston got rid of its most obnoxious billboards. <_<

You seem to complain a lot more than you contribute. Perhaps you should seek some professional advice to help you figure out the root of your unhappiness.

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The big banner is more interesting to look at than the odd empty space with a tiny text ad in the middle that I used to see. I like it. I guess it could be made collapsable for the no-ads folks, or something

Right now the no-ads crowd sees pretty much the same header as everyone else, except for the darkened 90 pixel zone at the top. And since the box ad is gone, they see more of the header picture. It looks like this:

BonelessChicken.jpg

When other header pictures come out in the future, I might make this skinnier for the subscribers, but I haven't decided and no one's expressed an opinion.

  • Fixed an error in the location of the user controls that affected subscribers only.

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Clicking on the title of the thread appears to take you automatically to the first unread post. Instead of having the option to go to the first post or the last like the old format, this one takes you to the first unread. It is not obvious right at first, as you have not opened the thread before in the new format, but it does do it the 2nd time.

I sure miss the list of new posts that we used to have. I'll agree that it is overall much more attractive than the old one.

  • In the thread list, clicking on the thread title takes you to the first post that thread.
  • Clicking on the date takes you to the last post in that thread.
  • Clicking on the orange icon that looks like a page with an arrow on it takes you to the first unread post in that thread.

Yes, there is a lot more clutter, but i like it very much. It looks modern.

It's been decluttered some since you wrote that, but I'll take any further suggestions to decluttering things.

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The maps feature seems to be gone.

It is. But only for a little bit. The maps project was a pretty big modification. It will be the last thing added back in once the format settles down.

I sorta would like the option to switch back to the old style skin if so desired if that option is available under IP Board.

It's not possible because the old skin didn't have the ability to do the logic and interface with the database that the new one does. The new one actually makes a bunch of decisions on its own, while the other one for the most part just did what it was told.

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OK, definitely the visuals are getting better. The New Content screen, IMO, can still use some work. I generally understand the use of whitespace to set off topics, but there just seems to be way too much of it. For example: The thread topic is huge, but the path (e.g., "Traffic and Transportation") is unnecessarily small. Then there is a huge horizontal whitespace, then three rows of small type with a lot more whitespace around it. Yet we don't have page number links for multiple pages. Hopefully the software will allow you to tweak a bit more. I think the vertical whitespace (between topics) could be trimmed like crazy, and I'm not sure we really need the "Attachments" link at all since you will see the attachments in the thread itself. I can get used to a lot of the changes, but the New Content page is what I look at most ofte, so I'm most focused on it.

As has probably been mentioned, in the threads themselves, there is a lot of vertical space between posts, just a ton of it. The sig area takes up a lot (which I could care less about, but others like the sig area). I think getting rid of the pictures for Administrator, Subscriber, et al, would help a lot, especially when the Group line appears to repeat the same info.

Thanks for working so hard on the site. It's such an important one for our area.

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  • The "Most Active In" feature is back - woohoo
  • It seems after posting in a thread, when you view New Content, it's now completely gone from the list, opposed to the old way where it was simply "Already Read"
  • Will the button "View Top of Page" be making a comeback? The Home key is working fine for now

  • Yep.
  • Done.
  • Fixed.

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Sigs are a little out of whack.

Yeah, after I ran a clean-up script a lot of them got messed up, mine included. For some reason it translated the BBCode into HTML and then left it in the signatures. Strange. Everyone check your signatures and your profile information, as it affected the About section of your profiles as well.

Also.. After typing the first line of this post, i went to my profile settings.

Upon returning to "Vew new content" ... This thread had dissapeared from the list completely. I had to get back here by viewing my last post thought my profile.

It should work the way you expect now.

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2 things that jump out at me. You can't skip to the last page of a thread without going into the thread. The "sub title" of a thread isn't below the thread title.

In New Content view, clicking the thread title should automatically take you to the last read post in that thread. I'm not sure if I know how to add a separate link to let you click to the end of the thread, but I'll put it on my list of things to investigate.

Thread subtitles exist when looking at a section's thread list. But in New Content view, it's replaced by breadcrumbs showing in what forum section the thread resides.

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