THE NEW SITE : bug reports etc.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Hey everyone, hopefully by now you've seen the new site: http://wondermark.com/index.php

There are a couple known issues and a couple things still being worked on, so this thread is for a status update on them. If you have any new bugs to report, or other comments as well, post 'em here to make sure I get eyes on them.

Known issues:
-------
RSS feed doesn't display alt-text.
Status: Corrected. This is now fixed.

LiveJournal feed shows multiple posts/multiple comics in post.
Status: Corrected. It's fixed now. It'll still have the alt-text problem until issue #1 is fixed though.

others? reports? feedback? thanks!

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:22 pm

Woah woah woah

Malki ! has a comic?

Joined: 21 Oct 2008 Posts: 1

I'm still subscribed to the Machine of Death RSS feed in Google Reader, and earlier today all of Wondermark's recent updates suddenly showed up in that feed. When I went and looked at the actual Machine of Death Feedburner feed, however, the Wondermark updates weren't there. No idea what that means.

Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 9009 Location: SOMEWHERE EXTREME

It's a bit wide.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

pizzocalabro wrote:

I'm still subscribed to the Machine of Death RSS feed in Google Reader, and earlier today all of Wondermark's recent updates suddenly showed up in that feed. When I went and looked at the actual Machine of Death Feedburner feed, however, the Wondermark updates weren't there. No idea what that means.

Both Wondermark and Machine of Death are hosted on the same server, and when I was updating Wondermark's feed, there was a hiccup where all the other feed addresses on that server were accidentally directed to the Wondermark feed. Then, Google Reader probably cached that version for a while.

The problem was noticed and fixed within about an hour, I think, but that was probably startling to feed followers, a bunch of whom I think unsubscribed because of that. Anyway sorry about the mix-up!

Dezro wrote:

It's a bit wide.

what's your screen resolution?

Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 9009 Location: SOMEWHERE EXTREME

1440, but I think it's kind of a waste to have one window using up the whole screen.

Really the problem is not that the page is wide, but that there's a bit of an invisible margin that's making it wider than it needs to be, and forcing the dreaded horizontal scrollbar to show up when it doesn't need to.

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 12:09 am

I see my facetious comment was ignored.

Well played gentlemen. I would not have expected any less of you.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

good job andrew.

Dezro, would it be better if the site loaded centered in your browser window?

Stats tell me that the vast majority of visitors have pretty large screen resolutions, and while the new site's a bit wider than the old, that's mainly because the old was pretty narrow.

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 4:09 pm

The invisible margin is only like 100 pixels so not a huge deal, but on the other hand there's no need for it and if you got rid of it the site would be pretty close to fitting into an 800x600 frame.

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 4:12 pm

Also I said this on twitter before but I really feel like the leaderboard banners could use a 1px dark border because when the content is similar in color to the background paper texture, it's confusing looking.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

I didn't even know about the 100px margin. Is that controlled in the stylesheet do you think? Or a page template?

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 4:18 pm

Not sure, I can take a look.

Also the RSS feed that your site is autodiscovering (so in Safari I can click the RSS button in the address bar) is not to the Feedburner feed.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Hmm, that's weird; it autodiscovers correctly in Firefox. I mean the wondermark.com/feed is the same as the Feedburner feed so it's not a big deal, but still that's weird.

Maybe the current version of Feedsmith (the WP plugin that redirects autodiscovery to Feedburner) doesn't support Safari 3...

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 4:26 pm

Why do you need to redirect autodiscovery at all? Why not just point it at the Feedburner URL?

The 100-ish pixel margin looks like it's the wrap div that's set in the stylesheet to be 1008px wide. Your background image is that wide as well, but at least 40 or 50 pixels of that (on each side) seems to be unnecessary.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

The feed is auto-generated by WP, I can't point it anywhere else before it's generated. Feedburner needs that feed to exist so it can have something to forward.

But it looks like if you click the links in the Safari feedreader, it is redirecting to Feedburner (and Google tells me it's a known problem). Either way I don't think it affects usability.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Looks like the margin thing is too complex for me to fix easily. "get used to it"?

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 6:55 pm

I think mine does this too, maybe it's a wordpress thing? It might be the two alpha channel things that create the dropshadows on the background whatever except that is not the widest part of the page! Hell I don't know (sorry)

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

thanks for the help justin

Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 9009 Location: SOMEWHERE EXTREME

Quote:

"get used to it"?

Okay!

ALSO: In .htaccess, you should add a 301 redirect from /index.html to just /
This will help search engines somehow, and in smarter browsers automatically change people's bookmarks from the old, now broken page to the new one.

Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:47 am

It helps search engines because if you don't redirect it, the search engine thinks that's two different pages but with the same content. Except I wouldn't be surprised if they've figured this kind of thing out well enough to make it not a big deal. The really important canonical issue is if you have www. and without the www. not redirecting to one or the other, but they are.

And Malki I'm not talking about how the feed is generated. The RSS button in Safari, Firefox, et al. has nothing to do with that. I'm talking about the line in your HTML that tells browsers where the RSS feed lives. Which would be this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Wondermark RSS Feed" href="http://wondermark.com/feed/" />

People who are reading from that directly instead of from feeds.feedburner.com/wondermark won't show up in your Feedburner RSS stats. If you just change the href in that link tag, it should fix it, no redirecting or weird stuff necessary.

Wondermark.com/feed still needs to exist of course and be generated as normal, but only Feedburner needs to ever actually see it.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Dezro wrote:

ALSO: In .htaccess, you should add a 301 redirect from /index.html to just /
This will help search engines somehow, and in smarter browsers automatically change people's bookmarks from the old, now broken page to the new one.

Well it's index.php, because it's a dynamically generated site, so if I do that I get a redirect loop -- "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete."

Miles wrote:

And Malki I'm not talking about how the feed is generated. The RSS button in Safari, Firefox, et al. has nothing to do with that. I'm talking about the line in your HTML that tells browsers where the RSS feed lives. Which would be this: (link)

Okay I didn't know about that.

Miles wrote:

People who are reading from that directly instead of from feeds.feedburner.com/wondermark won't show up in your Feedburner RSS stats. If you just change the href in that link tag, it should fix it, no redirecting or weird stuff necessary.

Ideally nobody's reading it at wondermark.com/feed, because Feedsmith directs that URL to Feedburner. (I think it's even doing this in Safari, despite the URL in the address bar.) I mean, I've made the change just to make sure, but it's also helpful to be able to turn the Feedburer redirect on and off (for example like yesterday when we were testing the alt-text fix and wanted to check the feed without waiting for Feedburner to update).