I’ve changed the site’s design, by popular demand. Nested comments weren’t working very well in the old one, although this design has its comment flaws, too: Namely, when the site automatically closes the input option for new comments, it causes all existing comments to vanish as well. I’ve put in a request to change that with the designer. Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here and sadly miss the days when having a decent blog CMS didn’t entail relying on others to provide working layouts for me.
This new look is OK, I guess, but it’s a lot less interesting than what was up before. On the other hand, it’s designed specifically to look good on mobile browsers, and the responsive design means I’m no longer limited to 480-pixel-wide images, something that never worked well with all the NES screenshots I use (as they’re 512 pixels when doubled in resolution for display and thus have to be cropped). It’s too late now for the Anatomy of a Game articles that have come before, but moving forward there’ll be no more screenshot butchery.
I’ll keep fine-tuning the look. And you? You enjoy your nested comments. Hopefully they’re worth the aesthetic trade-offs (and hopefully I can get the vanishing comment issue resolved).
The old design was really, really nice. I don’t frequent blogs a lot, but I loved how clean your blog was/is? I hope this design is something you want, or at least something that works for you. Keep up the good work.
This design does indeed look very clean on a mobile browser.
I have not decided yet. It does look sleek and shiny, but new things normally do.
You’ve lost your Telebunny favicon. Other than that, it’s looking OK. Already went back and read some of the nested comments I was missing out on before.
Hmm, yeah, the new design is serviceable (if not quite as pretty) and nested comments working is sure nice, but I do hope the designer is responsive on the closed comments issue – sometimes I don’t have time to check the site for a few days and it’s a shame to lose all the discussion.
I did like the old design, but the comments cutting off was getting annoying. Plus for me at least, the reply links never appeared on the page so I would have to do it from the notification page.
Still, so long as the content is good I’ll keep reading even if you went with a early 90’s Geocites site inspired layout.
But, uh, please don’t ever do though.
The old design had personality, but I found the low level of contrast between the gray serif font and the white background very hard to read. This is much easier on the eyes, if you know what I mean.
(Wow, I can post a reply!)
I liked the old design, my only qualm being that nested comments were cut off, an entire word or more. This new design is fine, though I would recommend a slightly darker font.
Why are comments closed after a certain time, anyway? Spam?
So much spam.
Looks great. Glad I can post replies, as I’ve never beat the deadline before. Is there a time limit for replies with the new format?
I have it set to two days now, and already I’m deleting about half a dozen spam comments per hour. I hope someday I can meet the people who have decided to make a living by plastering my work with their garbage.
What about a spam detection mechanism like Akismet? Don’t you want to use something like that, or are you already doing it and it still lets in too much?
It looks really good on my iPad mini. Much better than before. :)
I liked the look of the previous theme, but this still looks nice and clean. And my browser constantly cut off nested comments, and that was a bit annoying.
would love to see the toastyfrog favicon come back!
The previous look was markedly better. We trust you to do the necessary adjustments.
Love the design. Very simple, I just want to come here and read with no BS.
That said, the white is killing my eyes. Wish they had a dark theme. I’ve been using the chrome app stylish to blackout all of the websites I visit frequently because LCDs, dark rooms, and white screens do not mix.
My advice? Use a separate template for mobile browsers that favors function over form. Use your color scheme and a header image to distinguish your site and leave it at that. That’ll free you up to make your normal site as pretty as possible. All people really care about on phones is that the text and images scale well, and it’s a waste of time to worry about anything more in that arena.
Love the new design and the visible comments even more.
I like it, at least as much as the previous design and probably more. The contrast isn’t great on my monitor but everything always looks a bit washed out and bright on here. It’s definitely worth it for nested comments.
I’m sorry to hear about your spam problems, but I have to say I’m still glad to be able to leave comments. I work at night, so it’s hard for me to be able to do anything within a stringent deadline. Not that I’ll have something to say on every single post, of course. I’ll limit myself to when I feel I have something to add, which, since Super Mario Bros. isn’t one of my areas of expertise, may not even be all that often.
I don’t know if you know this, but apparently your Talking Time forums now require you to login before you can view anything at all.
If nobody can view the forums without creating a login account, they are unlikely to WANT to create an account, because they won’t be able to see the value in doing so.
Hopefully this is just a glitch, and will be fixed soon.
It’s not a glitch. Spambots were hitting the forums hundreds at a time, completely taking the entire site offline for several days by overloading the database. We’re discussing alternate solutions, but for the time being it’s either this or no website at all.