Welcome Aboard
deanesmay
Some parts are still rough and being worked on. If you spot errors or have criticisms just let us know, because we are in the midst of finishing some of the detail work.
You'll have to register to leave comments, but I hope you will.









I followed a link over from deanesmay.com— server change hasn't propagated to my neck of the woods yet. Overall, things look good— though I'm having to scroll way down to the bottom of a long page to post. Also, I'd put in my vote for keeping/returning to a sans-serif font— on your new layout, I'm seeing lots of, uh, serifs.
First Post! ;-)
....Happy 4th of July! God, and all Gods and Goddesses, Bless America! Land of the Free, Home of the Brave! Let's keep it that way!
I'm on a big monitor, 1600x1200, running Mozilla Firefox on Linux with custom font settings. (Microsoft fonts are available.) As I type this, "Defending the liberal tradition..." is low enough to partially cover the first left-hand box. The comments are in a bigger font than the main article, and the place to enter a new comment extends past the edge of the comment box. Some of the font sizes, in fact, look a little odd, like they don't match their relative importance. The BlogAd box appears to be too small to fit the BlogAd, as the rightmost blue edge appears to be cut off by the BlogAd's content. Oh, and some of the stuff at the end of your blogroll doesn't look like it probably should.
Overall, though, it looks OK. Personally, I tend to be a fan of sans-serif, so I'm not complaining on that score. Dunno if you're interested, but Tim Bray plays stylesheet games to let readers pick serif or non-serif fonts.
If you want screenshots, let me know. If some of this stumps you, I might be able to tweak your stylesheets to make things look right for me, which might tell you what the right style settings should be. Or not; I tend to be forgiving of presentation anyway, given the royal mess the standards are in right now.
Although it is private software, Chris tells me that at some point he plans to Open Source it, once he gets it where he wants it. One of the reasons I'm using it is because he's going to be taking a lot of input from me on customizing it.
Yes, the style sheets need work. We'll be tweaking for weeks, most likely.
I'm already mostly happy; the registration works good and the software is mad fast. I mean, fastfastfast. Which I like a lot.
Anyway, we'll be under construction a while.
By the way: Arnold Harris left the last comment on the old system. Paul Burgess leaves the first comment on the new system. Kinda nice to see the regulars helping step out of the old and into the new. :-)
I should point out something else. The DNS update came through, and I resubscribed my RSS feed reader. And noticed that your new RSS feeds are title-only.
That is a big regression from the old site. Please bring back article content in the feed!
I'm glad to see Paul Burgess here even before me, and Ara Rubyan. I hope to see Arnold Harris here soon. Also Tim the Soldier, and Wince and Nod, and Mark Noonan, and Scott Harris, and everybody else who was here before, all the old inhabitants of Dean's World.
Interesting new look. The style is still much the same. That's good! I'm very glad to see the same color scheme. Some changes. Some things still need some more tinkering. E.g., right here in this comment box I'm writing in now, the words partly scroll off so that I need to use the horizontal scroll bar or else enlarge it to fill the whole screen. Would prefer not to have to do so. That's a minor thing.
The MAJOR thing, as another commenter mentioned, is that you _ABSOLUTELY_ _MUST_ restore your links to your archives. So much has been written here in Dean's World, by Dean himself and by all of us commenters, that it would be intolerable to lose any of it.
2) Archives will be preserved.
3) There is no 3.
When I pass my mouse cursor over a block of text, the text will sometimes disappear. A second pass usually causes the block to reappear. No button action is required for this 'feature.' This happens at random, and is merely annoying. I can live with it if it appears difficult to t-shoot.
Rich
Of course, where Dean leads, many are sure to follow! :)
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.