Site news: Mild redesign in place
You may have noticed that Sox Machine looks a little different. If you didn’t, worry not. The idea that it shouldn’t look that different.
I’m trying to make limoncello out of lockout lemons by using the downtime to improve some structural stuff with the site. I’ve started by refreshing the site by getting it off a bloated page-builder infrastructure. Hopefully I’ve achieved it with minimal disruption, but if you encounter any issues, please let me know.
Once the redesign appears set and I get an idea of how it performs, a hosting change may be in the future, as your Patreon support allows me to consider better options each and every year. Again, the idea is that it wouldn’t interrupt your experience, but further bulletins as events warrant.
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Thus far, everything looks OK. Font looks sharper and more friendly to read (or maybe it is all in my head). Good luck with the design.
Pandemia aside, I guess your son came to your world in a good time with so little baseball news to keep you busy, he can have all your attention in his early days.
New haircut? Looks nice.
The update looks good.
If you are taking suggestions, would it be possible to have the login screen go somewhere besides the Profile page? Ideally, I would like to be redirected to the previous page, but always redirecting to soxmachine.com would be much better than the current situation.
I’ll see what my options are. I’ve never touched the login functionality, so I don’t know offhand how complicated it may or may not be.
I like how it looks. The hyperlink to go straight to the comments isn’t working for me anymore, though.
You mean from the front page headline?
Yes. After I read the article I sometimes come back later to read the new comments, and I used to be able to click on the icon with the number of comments and it would take me straight there. Now the icon doesn’t appear to be a live link.
Looks good so far. I must say I didn’t like the ads that you would have to click out of to read the articles. Not to be a jerk, but I would read the site less because it was just an annoying experience to go through every time I wanted to read a Sox Machine article.
They caught me by surprise, although that was my fault (I missed the initial email about them in the first week of the baby, and didn’t realize it was opt-out, not opt-in). Once I realized what was happening and couldn’t figure out a workaround to spare logged-in readers the experience, it wasn’t worth it
FYI, the link that takes you to the full archives is broken. If I haven’t checked the site in a while, I like being able to see all the articles that I’ve missed by going through the archives more than the front page.
That’s an easy fix once I get back in front of a computer. Thanks for the heads-up.
I’m fine with this mild redesign but I have always thought of Jim as more of a spicy guy than a mild guy.
FYI, Chrome is giving an “unsecure site” certificate. I had to approve it as a safe site to login
Yup, I’m in the middle of a server change. Should be resolved within an hour, hopefully.
Yeah, I got the same thing.
Jim, great redesign and easier on the eyes! I’m sure I will find more “useful” changes eventually, but for now still a big plus!
One thing I’ve noticed though is that I don’t see a favicon next to the URL. Not sure if there ever was one, but as I’m a rss type of guy, I’ve noticed that there is no favicon in my feed anymore and I imagine those would be related. This is nothing major and I can absolutely live without this aesthetic, but thought I’d mention it.
Thanks for pointing that out. It seems like some files didn’t transfer from the temporary server to the domain during the migration, so I’ll add it to the list to report.