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Welcome to Our New Look

Phillip Dampier May 8, 2009 Editorial & Site News 17 Comments

picture-12After a considerable amount of research, testing, and work, welcome to the new look of Stop the Cap!

Our old theme, Tarski, served us well for nearly a year.  However, it was obviously developed for lighter traffic websites where content didn’t get blown off the front page within 24-48 hours.  Since this issue exploded on April 1st as Time Warner Cable expanded its ludicrous Internet rationing plan, the fast pace here simply became untenable for our readers.  Most people don’t read beyond page two of a website, much less hunt around for articles written two or three weeks earlier.

This new theme allows our editors to keep important issues front and center so readers can obtain information that is still very relevant, but was written a short time ago.

You will also find an increasing number of articles that only display the first paragraph or two, followed by …Continue Reading.  This is to reduce page load time and let you scroll through articles more quickly.  Very important information is often contained “below the jump,” so I strongly encourage you to click on the “Continue Reading” option as often as possible.

Here are some highlights:

  • The horizontal menu bar below our heading offers several categories and topics to explore.  Some have drop-down menus that let the reader drill down for specific content, others bring readers all of the articles published here on a particular subject.  Cities tracks issues and developments in each hot spot where capping and consumption tiering has broken out.  Events gives you a rundown of upcoming activities (or prior ones) Stop the Cap! is working on, from public protests to legislative hearings you can attend.  Issues is the meat and potatoes section of our site, identifying important stories in the news.  Multimedia brings you audio and video clips and events.  Providers explores what Internet Service Providers are up to.  On the right side of the bar are a variety of information pages that are under reconstruction and reorganization at the moment.  The Subscribe button lets you access our RSS feed.  We are also planning an e-mail digest/notification system because RSS seems to be falling out of favor.
  • The four images beneath the horizontal bar are currently showing night skylines from four of the cities recently impacted by the Time Warner Cable “experiment.”  These images will be changing regularly to highlight important developments, issues, and projects that deserve special focus here.  If you hover your mouse over them, text content will appear, with a clickable link to additional information.  This is not yet functional.
  • The left side column will be the home of most of our content, with 10 articles per page.  Right above those articles, a Breaking News box may display late-breaking stories or important Calls to Action deserving your special attention.  The box below each headline will contain a byline, date of publication (and soon time I hope), the categories that apply, and the number of reader comments, if any.
  • The middle column currently contains: Recent Headlines, stories selected by our editors for their importance or reader interest, Recent Comments, which display the latest reader input we’ve received, and Popular Content, which consists of articles getting the most reader commentary.  The order of these will be adjusted shortly, with Recent Comments going on top.
  • The right column features a Search This Site box, where you can type keywords to locate a specific article, Content Tags, which give you a sense of how frequently a topic is covered here, a Blogroll of links to related websites, and Your Account, for account registration and sign-in/out.  Registering for an account takes seconds and makes submitting comments a lot easier.

It is important to note there have been some visual changes in this theme.  Linked content that you can click on now appears like this here.  The fonts have been changed.  Article headlines are in a sans-serif font which usually will present as Arial.  Article text will now appear in a serif font, typically Georgia.  Quoted text within the body of an article should be easier to read than it was under our old theme.  Please let me know if you experience any problems seeing fonts, reading the text, or any similar anomalies.

Here are the known bugs and problems we are working on:

The theme here is new, and there are some known bugs and issues we are already aware of and are working to resolve.  As they are repaired, the will be stricken from the list.

  • Embedded videos from Dailymotion are too big for the column space they are given, and barge into adjacent columns and content.  I will be working to resize these videos over the weekend to get them displayed properly.
  • There are some minor formatting problems with thumbnail images and how they present here.  I’ve already avoided using them in places where their presence would be immediately apparent.
  • The comment editor does not appear just below the comment you are replying to at this time. Remember, you can reply to the article -and- to individual comments left by others.  You can also edit your comments to correct any grammar problems you missed the first time.  Those with registered accounts here no longer have a time limit to edit their remarks, for your convenience.
  • The site is designed to render properly on most browsers and screen sizes, but has problems with Internet Explorer v6.0 in particular.  Mobile browsing is not currently supported, but may be in the future.

What is planned for the future:

  • E-mail notification of new comments left on the articles you participate in, as well as a subscription digest/alert to remind you new articles are available. [After commenting, you can now be notified of new replies!]
  • Paypal link to allow readers to contribute to help defray server expenses and software costs.
  • Various minor fixes and adjustments based on your input.

Please feel free to share your comments, impressions, and suggestions in the Comments section of this article.  I hope this theme change will prove helpful in the days ahead as we continue our fight.

Phillip M. Dampier
Editor, Stop the Cap!

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Tim
Tim
15 years ago

Looks a lot better Phillip. Good job! One thing I would like to commend you on, is the layout. Normally, websites, don’t fit my screen and are usually several sizes smaller. I have a 24″ monitor that runs at a resolution of 1920×1200 and most of the time I can fit 2 full webpages side by side on my screen.

I use Firefox 3.0.10 browser and everything looks ok so far in it.

sconsetmonkey
sconsetmonkey
15 years ago

Looks great Phillip.

iPhone view…yes?…maybe….Please?

Ben
Ben
15 years ago

How can I get to view *just* the recent articles column? This layout is painful to read on a netbook.

austin#7889
austin#7889
15 years ago
Reply to  Ben

Ben, perhaps you can use the RSS feed?
http://stopthecap.com/feed/

PaulK
PaulK
15 years ago

Wow! Awesome new look! Everything is much easier to read and it’s very aesthetically pleasing. Bravo!

Smith6612
Smith6612
15 years ago

Hey Phil, glad to see the new look here. Looks great and it’s nice and fluid. I did notice one problem with Firefox 3.0.10 and the comments form on this site. Whenever the text reaches the end of the form’s right side, it doesn’t “return” down to another line and instead blows out of the box and I have to enter it down to see the text, then edit the post to fix the formatting. Is anyone else seeing this? I’ll be checking with some other PCs shortly to see if it still does this.

Smith6612
Smith6612
15 years ago

Sure, I will send you a screenshot. This is basically what is happening as you can see . This window is near 1024×768 (1152×864) resolutions, however it is also doing it on higher resolutions as well. The PC I was on earlier was in fact a PC I owned running Firefox 3.0.10, and this PC I’m on, instead of running Windows XP, is running Windows 2000 and it is doing the same thing. The same thing is also taking place on my Vista box with Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta, even when the window is maximized (with my display set at… Read more »

Grayson Peddie
Grayson Peddie
15 years ago
Reply to  Smith6612

There does not seem to be any horizontal scroll bar in the comment section. When I typed in the text box for a test, Chrome does seem to scroll to the right so that I can see visible text. That way, I won’t miss out on what I typed. But when I get to the right edge of the text box, some areas of the comment section (again, not just the text box), got cropped off to the left, like I’m not able to read the comments unless I scroll to the left in the text box. If there’s no… Read more »

BrionS
Editor
15 years ago

I’m using Firefox 3.0.10 as well and it only doesn’t wrap for me if I type a single really long word. Otherwise, if there’s a space it breaks as expected.

I’m in Ubuntu 9.04 Linux with Firefox 3.0.10.

Grayson Peddie
Grayson Peddie
15 years ago
Reply to  Smith6612

Confirmed! When you type and get to the edge of the text box, the text box got clipped off from the edge of the comment section.

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/3473/textsectionclipped.jpg

This is with Firefox 3.5, which is currently in beta.

Grayson Peddie
Grayson Peddie
15 years ago

Why not replace Cities in the menu bar with “Articles by State?” A user will click in “Articles by State,” look for the state they’re currently living in, and choose which city. In the Articles by State web page, it will have 50 states listed in the left and list of cities in the right, if available. I’m not sure if you know XML, but you can list 50 states in an XML file. It’ll look like this: Note that it’s not indented, but this will give you a general idea of how you can use Javascript with XML. This… Read more »

Corrine
15 years ago

Congratulations, Phil. The site looks great!

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