Modern Vespa

You are at least two programmers judging by your productivity.

Yes. I generate the same amount of bugs as two programmers.

I like the new? login form - it looks nicely framed. Not so sure about the forums though. The framed look takes up over an inch of screen space. I'll get used to it, of course, it surprised me, is all.

Here's what I mean.

Thanks for that. Thought it was me pressing the wrong button again.

I'm glad it's not just me! Firefox latest on Win10 Surface Go.

It's not that I'm framing the page, exactly. I am limiting the maximum width of the page so that it doesn't end up looking ridiculous on big monitors. I'm currently using a nice round 1000 pixels as the target, but that might be (as Jim has pointed out) a scoche on the small side. We're still experimenting.

This is what I'm trying to avoid:

Turn your tablet to portrait mode and you'll see that it's not framing, it's fill.

I like the page outline as mentioned earlier, but it appears your page width restrictions are causing some strange column alignment issues in the menu.

Everything up through members is aligned left, everything after members aligns right, leaving a big ole empty gap between half the menu options. Chrome user here.

No, that's on purpose. And still a work in progress. I've isolated all the user-specific things on the right, and all general navigation on the left. Some of those items on the right are going to collapse under a user menu on the far right-hand edge (where "log out" currently resides) much like many other websites.

Coding as fast as I can here.

I've bumped up the max width to 1280 pixels. This should end up with only a small adornment on the sides of all but the largest tablets in landscape mode. On desktops, the fill on the sides will be more apparent when the window gets larger than 1280.

I've adjusted some things as the page gets smaller, too -- I am working toward better mobile support, and the minimum width of the page is now a little better than it was. But still not there yet. There are a lot of elements that need to adjust to a narrow page size, and I'm still working through the list.

No worries, just saw your discussion about the page width and thought it was unintentional column issue!

The width is fine for my laptop, but on my mobile phone the page goes from being too large to too narrow.....

Actually on a smartphone it is not noticeable because it is displayed vertically. ... and this is a side effect for me too ...

This effect is caused, on that particular page, by a long link pasted directly into a post. The link has no place to wrap, and so a single post becomes very wide. The browser then uses the width of that single (widest) post as the width for the entire page, and scales everything to that.

I would argue that it's the browser that is at fault here, but that's ultimately a losing argument. One more thing in a long list of things that break on mobile that I need to figure out how to address.

In any case, until I reformat topics to put the author information above the post instead of to the left, the experience on mobile in portrait mode is going to suck anyway. And I can't really do that until I address the menu width at the top of the page, which can only reduce to about 650 pixels wide before the two halves of the menu start running into each other.

So basically, I need to change everything

I have no problems, I can also visualize this way ...
In twenty-five years of surfing the internet "I have seen things you humans could not imagine, fighting ships ablaze off the Orion ramparts. And I have seen B-rays flashing in the dark near the gates of Tannhäuser ..!"

I'll put the coffee on.

For me decaf, thank you.

I think Jess needs something a little stronger......

Thanks for the virtual beverages, all!

I've just pushed a change that fixes one of those too-wide-everything-breaks issues, though it was most acute for iOS users. Android users might not notice.

The issue was YouTube videos, which had a fixed width. Looked great on desktop, not so much on mobile. Apparently YouTube videos are one of the notorious problems for responsive liquid design, as the video embed requires fixed dimensions in order to maintain the aspect ratio. Fortunately, there are some tricks that we can play with HTML to force the videos to resize to fit the available space, instead of overflowing the edges.

One more thing off the list.

Video looks good on both my iPhone and MacBook Pro, both with the latest OS updates. Miguel

Thanks much for the data point.

Thanks for cleaning up the stickies at the top of the page too. Miguel

I've pushed another fix to force long lines inside posts to wrap, whether they want to or not. This includes long links pasted into a message.

That plus the YouTube change I pushed earlier should fix most of the places where a single post can get excessively wide, though there are undoubtedly others.

Agreed.

I just tried to put an emoticon after a post and was unable to.

Ok I got it

I think I looked much more handsome on the older version.
Of course, I did just clean my screen. Go figure.

I think you're right.

I'm going some final testing on a new feature that's been in the works for a while now: Notifications!

That sounds boring, right? Actually, I'm pretty enthusiastic about this change. I think it's going to provide feedback to those who post in ways that we've never really had at MV before.

Soon, soon. Still shaking out the last few bugs.

Ahh, back to normal for me, anyway. Thanks Jess!

w00t!

My phone is an Android using Chrome (happy to give exact version details, if needed). The recent MV updates for mobile make it much easier to read!! No more trying to zoom in and scroll sideways to actually have the font a reasonable size is awesome. I mean, yeah, I just got my first pair of bifocals, but they only do so much.

I will say that it does look awkward though, as the left side with the posters' profiles take up about 2/3 of the width of the page. Would simply shrinking the profile pics a bit help solve that, or would you need to mess around with tables or something else equally annoying (my programming knowledge stopped after HTML 4)? Otherwise, what you changed seems to be working pretty well for most threads. YouTube doesn't break it, but extra wide images and long links still do.

Great to hear! I am actively trying to remedy that right now, though it's probably going to take some time to fully work out. The forum layout was never intended for use on mobile phones (heck, mobile phones didn't have web browsers when this software was created) and it's... messy.

Ultimately, I am going to try to have one version of the website that serves desktop and mobile equally well, reducing the amount of "stuff" as the screen size gets smaller. It is, unfortunately, a slow and incremental process.

For tall narrow layouts (e.g. a mobile phone) the author information will move above the post, instead of next to it. It's already like this on the stripped-down iPhone version of the website -- I just need to make the main website adapt itself automatically for any screen size.

Eh, I figured it couldn't be something too terribly easy. I really haven't done much of anything programming-related since having to make both IE and Netscape happy, so I can imagine trying to acommodate multiple versions for different devices isn't even remotely as fun.

The first smartphone I ever got was an iPhone 3G, and for the few years I had it, I got spoiled being able to use MV so easily with that format, lol. It took me a few weeks to remember that you only had it set for iPhones as far as a special mobile layout when I got a different phone. I still say that iPhone layout way back when I could actually use it was the most user-friendly forum I've ever encountered on mobile.

The browser compatibility landscape is both better and worse these days. Better in that nobody has to code around IE6's broken-ness any more, and the support for advanced features in modern browsers is now widespread.

It's much harder in that the expectations are now much higher. Mobile phones have become a dominant force, and sites must accommodate them or perish. Google punishes MV in search results because we don't have a mobile layout -- well, not one that Google cares about, anyway.

The holy grail is called responsive design -- a site layout that can adapt to any screen size and still look good. I've only just begun that process, addressing the various things that screw up the layout on mobile. The current bane of my existence is Fuelly images in signatures, which make the page wider than it needs to be. After that it will be something else. Hah! That layout is still active today, but I don't think it has aged well. It exists in parallel with the main site, and I am constantly breaking things on the iOS side with changes to the main site. And lots of features are missing from the iOS version -- notifications, for instance, aren't present there.

Eventually, when the main site can adapt to any mobile phone, the iOS version will disappear. That's the goal, anyway.

Scratch Fuelly images in signatures off the list. It was an easy fix. All images in signatures will now resize gracefully as the screen size gets smaller.

Was gonna suggest there are some responsive design css templates you can probably find one close enough to modify for this site style. But again that's probably a decent amount of work onto your plate and i think it's not necessary. I understand website layouts on phone is a mixed bag and expect it to display strange. In fact half the time i end up selecting the chrome feature to display as desktop website instead. I'll prefer to have to zoom and scroll for days over strange auto web layout formatting that exists on most sites.

Btw, im one of those fuelly signature users, but i chose to use the condensed version for that reason.