BYBLACK DUCK

Friday Madness

By on February 23, 2008 in blog

First, I’d like to apologize for our flaky uptime this last Friday. We have a major web update we are trying to release and unfortunately we ran into a series of challenges that prevented us from releasing it.

We’ve had to rollback for now. We’ll focus on the performance issues and get this out asap. Thanks for your patience.

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  • petur (Peter D’Hoye)

    Is that also so for the content? Because a project I like to follow (Rockbox) hasn’t been updated for 20+ days.
    I see the web layout was updated now, it will need some time getting used to

  • http://kevin.sb.org eridius (eridius)

    Ack, this new interface is a lot harder to navigate than the old one. I don’t like it.

  • http://nitens.org dartar (dartar)

    I also find the new interface harder to navigate – the horizontal tabs in the project page were quite practical and adding two vertical menus makes the main content really narrow!

    BTW you have links pointing to the server IP address in the footer.

  • robin (Robin Luckey)

    @Peter — I’ve bumped Rockbox to the head of the queue. We’ve been very busy over the last few weeks, but I think the storm is over and we should be catching up again.

  • jason (Jason Allen)

    eridius & Dartar!

    Sorry to disappoint you with the new UI. Beyond returning to the previous UI, are there any changes we could make to improve? What’s hard to do now that was easier before?

  • http://identi.ca/jonan Jonan (Jonan)

    The most annoying thing I’ve noticed is that when a project has lots of tags the “Ohloh Analysis Summary” goes far down. When this happens it’s quite frustrating because you can see a really big blank space and you can’t see what’s interesting (Ohloh Analysis Summary, Reviews, etc.)

    Another thing which I don’t know if everyone experiences (I have a screen resolution of 1680×1050) is that lots of enlistments don’t fit in the assigned space and so things get mixed up one over another :S

  • jason (Jason Allen)

    Thanks Jonan!

    I will get on it right away.

  • jason (Jason Allen)

    Hi Jonan,

    I checked in a fix for the project page – it generally wastes a lot less whitespace. Let me know what you think.

    I was unable to see an example of the enlistments page problem you’re seeing. Could I trouble you to provide me a link?

    Thanks for the help and feedback.

  • http://identi.ca/jonan Jonan (Jonan)
  • Joost (Joost)

    I get the same result whatever resolution used in Firefox. If I try it with IE it looks fine.

  • http://nitens.org dartar (dartar)

    Jason, as I said above:

    adding two vertical menus makes the main content really narrow!

    scroll down http://www.ohloh.net/projects/45 to see what I mean

    Also, some random notes:

    1. the markup tips have gone from the forum forms (so I don’t know how to create a list for one!)

    2. experience for non-tracked or closed-source projects generates completely uninformative listings. The boxes on my profile page only say: Total measured activity (which is obviously empty for non-tracked projects) and all other project-related information (name, language, description) is not displayed. Maybe “Total Measured activity” was meant to be replaced by the project name?

    3. Non-tracked projects generate broken links, e.g. http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/1775/positions/1939 linked from my user profile

    4. IMO experience should be ordered “latest first”, at the moment it seems pretty random.

    5. There’s something really weird going on with the “technologies” section in the commit timeline screen: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/45/contributors/193273530095

    6. All headings (including Friday Madness here) have a very narrow kerning. Is that intentional?

    7. There’s an ugly horizontal scrollbar in FF2/Mac OS 10.5 – it looks like it’s generated by: html > body > div .row > hr .two clear

    (BTW for some reason the last download of WikkaWiki from the SVN base failed and the stats are stuck since Feb 4)

  • kriede (Kurt Riede)

    The ‘EDIT’ link to edit a position on the right of a persons profile seems to belong to the prevoius project, if the previous project uses many technologies.

    Example: open this url
    http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/7266/positions
    and see last project ‘domingo-connector’. The ‘EDIT’ link on the right side seems to belong to the previous project ‘domingo’.

  • robin (Robin Luckey)

    @Jonan, Joost –

    Yes, that’s not very legible. I’ve rearranged the enlistments page elements a bit, which should help.

    Thanks for reporting this,
    Robin

  • http://kevin.sb.org eridius (eridius)

    @Jason

    Mostly the content is too narrow now because of the vertical menus. Also, the first time I loaded the site with the new look, I thought I had gone to the wrong site – it just looked so different it didn’t even look like it was providing the same service at first. I also had to fumble around a bit to find all the links I was used to finding in the horizontal bar at the top.

    In other words, I don’t really have any concrete complaints, just mostly that it’s harder to figure out how to do stuff than it was before. Also, I liked the aesthetics of the old site better. It was much more distinctive and, well, fun. This new look feels like it’s lost a lot of the unique image of the old site, it feels much more like every other whitespace-heavy-design out there. And I think that’s a bad thing.

  • http://identi.ca/jonan Jonan (Jonan)

    @Robin

    Great work, it’s all clear now thanks :P

  • robin (Robin Luckey)

    @dartar,

    I’ve just deployed some changes that I think clear up most of the troubles.

    i. The markup tips are back.

    ii. This was a bug, and is now fixed.

    iii. Another bug, now fixed.

    iv. Positions are supposed to be sorted by the date you quit the project, most recent first, but it looks broken and generally confused. I’m still investigating this one.

    v. I think this is now less weird.

    vi. It was intentional, but not unanimous. I’ve toned it down a bit.

    vii. Yuck. I hate horizontal scroll bars. I think I killed it, let me know if it shows up.

    Thanks for the detailed feedback. We know there’s a lot of polish yet to be done, and your notes help.

    (BTW a new update of WikkaWiki has just completed).

    Thanks,
    Robin

  • robin (Robin Luckey)

    One more note: we are considering widening up the entire site a bit. It seems like most web sites are moving to a slightly wider layout. Thoughts?

  • http://naesten.googlepages.com SamB (Samuel Bronson)

    The forum threads could definitely do with being a little wider. (They say that 66 characters per line is ideal for prose.)

    As for the site in general, about what width in pixels were you thinking?

  • http://naesten.googlepages.com SamB (Samuel Bronson)

    Oh. I see a horizontal scroll bar for some reason, though I see nothing over there to scroll to… thankfully, I don’t hate horizontal scroll bars very much unless I actually have to use them ;-) .

  • jason (Jason Allen)

    @Samuel

    We’re currently 790px wide (40 pixel columns and 10px gutters). I was thinking of moving to 890px instead.

    Secondly – I think I fixed the horizontal scroll bar bug. Let me know if you still see it.

  • http://nitens.org dartar (dartar)

    Thanks Robin, much better now.

    Out of curiosity, is there a reason why languages is not in the main navigation menu?

  • jason (Jason Allen)

    @dartar,

    Leaving the languages from the main menu was mostly a pragmatic one – not enough space to add everything.

    The UI update’s primary goal was to make it easier for us to add more content to Ohloh. I expect we’ll be re-evaluating what goes in the top menu in the near future.

    Thanks again for helping out with all the suggestions/bugs/feedback!

  • http://dottedmag.net/ dottedmag (Mikhail «dottedmag» Gusarov)