tsn8 - A Work In Progress This just in! Special news and announcements from the administrators will be posted here.

[Neo]

Well, the server is mostly moved to a new location...thepizzy and tsnlocal are still in progress, but the forums are back up.

I pushed out the work I did last night for the New Posts section of the My Spot page. And during the design it looked cool, but with everyone's different avatars I'd be interested to know what everyone else thinks. I know that my avatars are designed to be somewhat symmetrical across the diagonal so that I can display it in quarters, halfs, or whole, but not everyone can make their own avatar.

[Neo]

I've been working on the other sites, getting everything migrated all day. All the wordpress installations on thepizzy are still down...and thepizzy.net/blog is a fairly popular site. Which means I haven't really been posting a lot today...or working on any of the fixes.

I did add a couple more things to the Github issues list, more along the lines of things I want to do.

[Neo]

Everything is back to normal now on all 3 sites.

[Neo]

If you've been through the Memberlist to see the new user profiles, you might have encountered some slow-loading pages. There are a couple user profiles that I'm attempting to narrow down and deal with, though I'm not sure why they're causing it to slow.

I've had to delete a couple users whose profiles, for some reason, caused the system to slow down. They weren't active users, even back in the day:

• guitarwizardzero
• sandrock
• shittles
• swirlfire
• smitty_rock

Take a moment of silence for their accounts if you wish, but there's a good chance you don't even remember who they are. I retained all their posts, so their "legend" will live on...and because that's what we do around here...we keep the posts.

[Neo]

Because I've removed those users... It means I can turn on the In-board Notification system. Soon, you'll see a little Bell icon next to the Private Messages icon in the top right of the site. There you'll see whatever notifications you've elected to see via the User Control Panel > Board Preferences > Edit Notification Options page.

[Pam]

Woohoo!!! There is a bell next to my messages icon!!!

[Neo]

One of the things I'm trying to do with this version of the site is actually incorporate feedback into the iterations of the site - even though I'm not budging on the no-response response.

One example which I'll be starting on shortly is the enhanced version of the Mobile My Spot page, at the suggestion of Pam. At that link you can see the design I'll be shooting for, which will address some of the other issues I have with the mobile version like the ability to side-scroll 5 pixels for no reason, that I can't seem to fix.

It'll also bring the site a little closer to what I originally intended when I started to redesign things - but had to back off from when I upgraded to phpbb 3.1 and unexpectedly broke things. Let me know what you think - and if you have any other ideas.

[Neo]

Last post of the night...

In the interim while I work on the mobile version of the My Spot page, I have made the TSN Special Report section aware of whether you've read it or not. Right now, that only affects the mobile version (or the small screen desktop size). If your browser window can't display the normal desktop version, the tsnSpecialReport section will disappear if you have already read the first post. Additional posts will show up in the New Posts section like normal.

Soon, I'll have a collapsed version on the desktop view, so that the page doesn't look so naked when there are no new posts. Eventually, if the rate of posting slows down, I may have to append "Unanswered Posts" to the end of New Posts so that there is something to talk about nearly all the time. But for now, your mobile version just got a little less cluttered if you've read the latest special report.

[Neo]

I finally got to sit down (mostly) uninterrupted and work on the navigation part of the mobile version of the site. It's nearly there, with a couple issues to fix in a "sticky nav" feature I'm trying for the first time.

After that, the rest of the My Spot page should be relatively simple to do, but our packing schedule has just changed because of GlennCoco's work schedule...and my work schedule. So I'm going to continue working on it when I can, but my time is being taken up by a lot of other things over the next couple days. Tomorrow night will be going through some stuff for her to give away on Friday during the day, so idk if I'll get to any development.

Here's what it would look like (the navigation) before scrolling...


And after scrolling some....


It basically sticks to the top of the page while you go down. The notification bell goes white with a number when you have them (and the dropdown will display on click). The Private Message icon changes to an opened mail, and the Quick Links & User menus are also there on click.

There are still some kinks to work out - but it's the hardest part of any website. As for the rest of the page below the navigation - I haven't even touched it.

[Neo]

Well, since most of you were not on this evening, you might be in for a shock when you sign on tonight or this morning. I've been doing some work! I was able to get a lot more done tonight in the little bit of time I had compared to the past couple nights when I had more time.

If you're a mobile user, you'll be happy to know that I've fixed the Mobile Avatars overlapping issue you might have noticed in the Newest Posts section. But you may be more surprised to see that the Mobile My Spot and Mobile header stuff has been released. Give it a shot. The forum list is collapsed, and the "tsnForums" text is a link to the forum index. You can also expand the list to jump straight to a particular forum. The Special Report is gone from the Mobile version, if you've read it, and it comes back if you have not.

For you desktop users, the Special Report is collapse if you've read it, and can be expanded if you want to see it. It will be auto-expanded and stay auto-expanded until you've read it. It's a Special Report...it gets front page positioning because it's important. . The forum list is also collapsible on the desktop as well...but it doesn't do much good there - it's really so you can show it if your browser resizing causes you to go mobile, and you hide it, then go back to desktop and it's still hidden.

There are still some more fixes in the works for the tsn8 1.1 release (which is really just a bookmark in the code since I've been pushing this stuff public as I fix it).

[Neo]

Tonight, I updated the My Spot page to show a list of Active Topics for people who are viewing the My Spot page while logged out. This way people can get a view into the type of discussions going on with the site, instead of seeing an empty page below the news story.

[Neo]

Knocked out a couple more things today...

The logo at the top of the page will take you back to the My Spot page - so if you're used to clicking there, it works again.

Also updated some of the My Spot stuff for tablet views. I'll do an actual tablet overhaul for the My Spot page for the June 1st release.

I'm looking for alternatives to the mobile navigation menu, and might get rid of the persistent one in favor of one that just scrolls normally with the page. Let me know if this latest version is an issue for you mobile users.

[Neo]

At the request (and reminder) of ~day_dreamer~, I have added Instagram to the profile pages. If you want your instagram on your profile, go update your contact info in your User Control Panel > Profile

[Neo]

I've been tossing around some ideas for an updated design on the tablet view. I'm not sure if I want it to look very different (as a transition to the more updated design that I originally wanted) or to just fix what is here. I'm open to thoughts and suggestions.

I haven't done much coding and updating - I've been taking a break from all that to deal with house stuff, and to avoid getting burnt out again (I have been working nearly every day since December on the site, after all). I'll slip in some fixes where needed, if brought to my attention, but a majority of my spare time is gonna be dedicated to packing and moving during this month.

[Neo]

I haven't been doing any work on the site lately, as you can probably tell, because I've been packing and preparing to move. However, during the course of this week, there turned out to be some networking issues on the webhost's end, causing the site to become inaccessible. I think it was a general DDOS attack because access was intermittent. They change the server's IP address, and then all the DNS servers had to propagate throughout the internet. It seemed to take longer this time, than it did when I had the server moved to a new box entirely.

Currently, I'm researching what it takes and costs for me to host my own web server over on Amazon. If I can do that, I'll be able to control things a little more tightly, as far as updates, security, and additional features (like running a jabber server for a tsnChat/IM service, etc). If I am reading the EC2 stuff correctly, I can do all this for free for the first year, to get a feel for what it's like. The only downside is that I'm not a server admin these days - there is a lot of stuff I'm not up to speed on, and right now the web host people take responsibility for all that, but at the cost of my personal flexibility.

In all, though, it seems like something worthwhile, since there are new technologies I'd like to explore for the rebuild of the site into more of an Application instead of a website.