I still haven’t got the filtering of the comment titles to my satisfaction though, so am fossicking around the ‘net for a solution. I probably won’t be the only person with this issue, and I bet someone will have sussed it somewhere. Shall let you know if/when I find anything useful.

Life is sweet indeed.

Turns out I do much prefer the single, darker blue; but a little tilting of the screen, depending on ambient light, solves that problem quite nicely. And I do still miss the frogman’s take on Ernie G. T-shirts. LOL!!

Bravo! GREAT JOB!!! :>)))))))))

And the sidebars are by no means ‘settled’ into their final form, it is more a case of ‘suck it and see’… some changes already planned.

BTW,I appreciate the disappearance of the Turing code. That won’t be missed!

Clunky, yes. But there are a lot of benefits to threaded discussions that I haven’t fully explored. Archively and distraction-wise, they are nice for isolating off topic dialog from the author’s topic without active intervention. Just a technical question, is it possible to make threading a tick box on the article creation page? Then contributors could work it out and market forces would prevail.

I do like the idea of allowing regulars to register for a password and then getting expanded privileges or commenting scope per the spambot. But definitely keep the stone table mode functional. I’ve already tried, admired, and then turned off the scripts to make the buttons show. There are very many (some quite good) sites that I don’t comment on because of a registration requirement to comment. As long as registration is an ‘added-privileges’ option, then I’m for it.

I really like the recent comments part of the front page and I watch it closely. That said,

The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.

We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.

does something important on a front page. I read it often. It is something first time visitors should see right away while they are still trying to figure out what they have stumbled into. Even the lyrical cadence of the laundry list suggests to people that they might find what they are looking for even if they aren’t sure what it is called.

I see the trade off between that prime real estate going to “latest comments” or to “who we are” as being a priority choice between luring in strangers or conveniencing us regulars. This cuts to the question of whether the blog’s priority is that of a think tank “developing the social individualist meta-context for the future” or of a recruiting and outreach forum seeking to “infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property.” Shading that scale is something that only Perry can do.

“@Shaun: If you actually try, you will find that you don’t need Javascript to make a comment. You need it only if you’re too lazy to type any markup that you need. Also, the point of bringing in an expert (me) is precisely to address these details.

Thus: deal with it.”

Any Engineer worth his salt, when handed a foreign object with a brief to design and build a superior version of the foreign object, would necessarily take the time and make the effort to understand the design, construction and performance envelope of the foreign object. This reduces the probability of the new design being infected with an inferior performance.

If Admin had bothered to take the time and make the effort to review the design and construction of the previous version of this site, he would have been astonished to discover that no Javascript or Ajax rubbish was required to preview or post a basic comment at this site. Indeed, provided that commenters did not use some bug infested browser, HTML was available to allow commenters to indulge embelishing their words.

In one way modern software development and government share a common trait….. how to pile on as much rubbish as possible while wasting as many resources as possible and still comeup short with a better product to do a simple operation, yet get the customer/taxpayer to payup.

Sad really……

But I am also certain that Perry will reinject the Britishness you seek, once I fully hand over the reins.

It had a firm air of Britishness to it. The front page was full of usefull info without being clogged up or clunky. There was a natural flow to the page scrolling down and off to the sidebars. Font sizing, style and spacing seemed natural to its position and intended useage on the page. The whole site was pleasant to the eye, offering encouragement to continue reading articles and wanting to return……. much like the British school teachers of old, presenting their teaching materials to their students with vigour, drawing the students to expand their knowledge and horizons.

The new version is crude and clunky, indifferent to what is on offer. Both sidebars look more like space fillers, especially the right sidebar, than something of use. The alternating background colours for each comment says that management suspects its readership has difficulty differentiating between the finish and the start of each comment. The current version is all I would expect from a couple of script kiddies playing with their Linux box.

Further up in comments Admin declares…….

“Now, WordPress, bang up to date, with WP-SuperCache and a few other bits of magic.”

…… the only thing bang-up-to-date here is that Samizdata.net has finally joined the general decline of the once great Great Britain.

I wonder if Admin was around these parts a decade plus ago ??

http://web.archive.org/web/20020717121017/http://www.samizdata.net/blog/

Sad really………..