New TLS Front Page

[Cthulhu]

Sensible ones?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Just 'cause you're a tentacle monster doesn't mean you have to be a thinly veiled metaphor for a penis.

I was hoping for something a tad more specific, but if that's the best you've got, I'll give it my best shot.

 

[Fangu]

Yop, be nice

Well, technically there's not much to add... I think all authors just have to get used to formatting their articles, using the Visual Editor or HTML.

When you want to add your featured image, use the featured image box on the right side when writing the post. You can crop it the way you want it using "Edit Image" after uploading it from your computer - I'm gonna write a guide how to do this, but it should be explained pretty well in the image editor itself. If you don't crop the image, WordPress will use the pre-cropped version, so just make sure you upload a picture in the Featured Image box. (If you don't, WP will use one of your attached images.)

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Gracias, my dear. I'll be your tentacle monster any time.

 

[Fangu]

Found what looks like a decent Social sharing thing. Need Yop to take a quick look at it, and try it out on the test server. It shouldn't fuck up anything.

 

[Cthulhu]

It should be okay, but on his own homepage it looks to load a bit oddly. Could be just me though.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/loginradius-for-wordpress/screenshots/ looks nice too, although it could be a bit too much as it also adds login via social networks to poast comments and shit.

 

[Flintlock]

I noticed another bug on the "related articles" list. At the moment, the top story is chapter 3 of the DoC LP. It's filed in the same category as chapters 1 and 2, yet chapter 2 is missing from the list.

 

[Pixel]

Just a little heads up; the commentaries section isnt linked to a page. Wasnt sure if this is being worked on

 

[Shademp]

Just a little heads up; the commentaries section isnt linked to a page. Wasnt sure if this is being worked on

Fixed. I had forgotten to publish the page.

 

[Fangu]

I noticed another bug on the "related articles" list. At the moment, the top story is chapter 3 of the DoC LP. It's filed in the same category as chapters 1 and 2, yet chapter 2 is missing from the list.

Thanks for noticing. I see that bug's been there even before the launch. I've found the source.

Edit: What has happened is that the Related Articles now ignores titles that is either in the top story or in the 3 other previews. (Funny enough, it does what More News is supposed to do (exclude already listed titles), while More News includes the titles like Related Articles should have done.) I tried rewriting it in 10 minutes but several functions needs rewriting, and I don't have time to do it today. I have a school assignment due for midnight, but most importantly, I have company.
Edit 2: tl;dr

 

[Fangu]

1. Fixed the related articles thing (not More News, I'll fix that later)
2. I see the featured image for the top story isn't 2:1 now - are you guys fine with allowing custom sizes for that pic, or should I force an auto cropped 2:1 version if the image isn't at 2:1 scale?

 

[Flintlock]

1. Fixed the related articles thing (not More News, I'll fix that later)

I noticed that there was nothing in the related articles list when this week's roundup was the top story. Is that what you fixed?

2. I see the featured image for the top story isn't 2:1 now - are you guys fine with allowing custom sizes for that pic, or should I force an auto cropped 2:1 version if the image isn't at 2:1 scale?

I've been making all the images in my articles 2:1. That is the kind of thing that we should put in our authors guide. In fact, I might as well share what I wrote a week or two ago when I first came up with the idea. It's just a draft, of course.

• Remember that your article will go on the front page. If we go offline for a few hours, for example, it's probably not worth making an article explaining and/or apologising for the disruption. Instead, make the relevant announcement on the forum, where regular visitors are more likely to look. There isn't much merit in displacing "real" news articles from the front page with the details of our MySQL version or whatever, especially as casual visitors may arrive long after the disruption is over and would almost certainly rather see something more interesting.
  
• Try to come up with a concise headline. They are arguably the most important part of any article. Think about what the article is actually about. Let's say you've spotted an article on IGN in which Yoshinori Kitase states that there will be a remake of FFVII. A good headline would be "Final Fantasy VII remake in the works", or "Kitase announces Final Fantasy VII remake". A bad headline would be "IGN reports new Final Fantasy VII game" or "Yoshinori Kitase speaks out in new interview". The first one is poor because IGN aren't actually part of the story (it would still merit a place on our front page if Gamespot had done it). Of course, it's fine to credit IGN by linking to them in the article, as nobody expects a small site like us to become a primary source of news. The second one is poor because it does not state the main point of interest. Kitase might be interviewed every day of the year, sometimes about new Square Enix games and sometimes about which brand of toothpaste he uses, but only the first one is newsworthy. Additionally, avoid using phrases like "see below", or "click here", as they take up unnecessary space. Full stops and exclamation marks should not be used at the end of headlines.
  
• If you want to write about two largely disparate topics, such as "Aerith's Theme inducted into Classic FM Hall of Fame, Square Enix laying off 200 workers", split them up into two articles - unless it's a roundup!
  
• Make sure your article is categorised and tagged properly. Our category structure is split into three main parts: news, items of interest, and Lifestream projects. Within those parts are sub-categories, which should be pretty self-explanatory. Browse the categories and find the right one for your article; if in doubt, make your best guess, publish the article, then ask one of our editors. Tag all the games that feature in your article, unless it's only a passing reference: for example, if you have written an analysis of VII and happen to compare it to VI in one or two ways, you should tag Final Fantasy VII but not Final Fantasy VI.
  
• Find a good image or video to go with your article. Every article should be illustrated in some way, so if you can't find anything appropriate, use a stock image, for example the logo of FFVII, if that's what your article is about. Pictures on the front page use the 2:1 aspect ratio, so if you are able to find something with those proportions, you'll know it won't get stretched or cropped for the front page. Otherwise, consider editing it yourself inside Wordpress so that it fits the front page. If you use multiple pictures and want a particular one to be used on the front page, set it as the "featured image" in Wordpress.
  
• Sum up the main points in your article's introduction. Bear in mind that the first couple of lines from your article will be visible on the front page. Let's take a Let's Play video as an example. What is more important to someone looking at the front page: a quick description of what happens in that chapter, or "Welcome to another chapter of Let's Play Game of Compilation. This time I'm joined by..."?
  
• Write either passively or in the third person, unless you are writing an opinion piece. Your name will appear as the author of the article, but you are writing on behalf of the Lifestream, so avoid using "I". What you should use instead depends on the type of article you are writing. If you are sharing an interview you have found elsewhere, write "Yoshinori Kitase has been interviewed", using the passive voice. If you are giving a message to our visitors or otherwise speaking on behalf of the site, feel free to use "we", e.g. "We'd like to wish everyone a happy Christmas". That goes for Facebook and any other social networks that we might use. It keeps things looking coherent and professional.
  
• Make a forum post to go alongside your article. Let's make this a hard-and-fast rule: every single article that is published on the front page should link to at least one forum article where it can be discussed. As well as keeping threads alive on the forum (I notice the Type-0 thread has been revived since yesterday's roundup, for example), it will encourage people to sign up and grow our community.

 

[Fangu]

I noticed that there was nothing in the related articles list when this week's roundup was the top story. Is that what you fixed?

Yeah, the bug you pointed out.

The list was empty for your roundup because the only other article in that list (the first roundup) was shown in one of the smaller sized previews. The code was set to exclude articles already printed as one of the 4 previews with pictures.

 

[Flintlock]

Yeah, the bug you pointed out.

The list was empty for your roundup because the only other article in that list (the first roundup) was shown in one of the smaller sized previews. The code was set to exclude articles already printed as one of the 4 previews with pictures.

Oh right, I hadn't quite understood it before , but it makes sense. Thanks for fixing

 

[Fangu]

Adding this to the thread, as writing it is sorta a part of the New FP project.

How to add a Featured Image

(Located in Active Projects in the sticky "Checklist of Things to Check before publishing an article")

 

[Fangu]

Hey guys, when setting a featured image, use one at around 500 px width, and use the cropper as explained in the link above. Pics will be automatically resized for the smaller previews, so you don't have to set them at exact size.

(If you decide to crop them yourself, use a calculator and make sure they are to 2:1 scale, as in 500x250 pixels or similar.)

 

[Flintlock]

Does it matter if they're larger than 500px?

 

[Fangu]

Nope

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

This is probably a Fangu or Yop question: How long can each page in a multi-page article be before things start looking boinked?

 

[Fangu]

You mean before a page is split into a new page?
(1 page split into 2, 2 split into 3 etc)

Edit: To force a page change, use <!--nextpage-->
Now trying to find out how WP decides when enough is enough


Or did you mean "how long should we allow a post to be"? Because I'm not sure if you guys are actually using <!--nestpage--> already, or if long posts are auto-shortened.

Spoiler: Notes for myself

Link for future study

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Yes, I mean "How long before using the 'nextpage' command to split 1 into 2, 2 into 3, etc."? In the past, I had problems with blank pages appearing because I made some pages too long.

I don't know if there is an actual limit to article size. I would think I would have hit that wall by now if it were there.

Thanks, by the way.

 

[Cthulhu]

It's a good question, to which there is not really a good answer.

News / article sites often break up their articles into pages on purpose, so that if a user wants to read the entire article, they will automatically generate a lot of page views (six+ per article), thus racking up ad impressions.

Second reason for breaking up articles into pages is because supposedly people prefer their articles in bite-sized chunks, for example for staggered reading (one page at a time with breaks in between). More recently, a trend the other way has been forming, with people preferring articles on one page. I'm not really sure what people prefer.

There's also performance and bandwidth. If you have a long page, it'll take a while before it's loaded (the html / text), and quite a bit of bandwidth if you have a lot of images on there - even if they're Wordpress-generated thumbnails. I've seen a few 6+ MB articles / pages on TLS when I was checking it out. More advanced sites - tumblr, for example - have employed a 'load on demand' kinda thing, where stuff like images, but also posts and things like related articles / footers are only loaded when they come or about to come into view. Which is fancy.

There's a setting in an optimization module we use that will lazy load images, i.e. only download them when they come into view. I switched it on to try it out earlier, but the experience was quite jarring (think images popping up when you scroll down) and I'm not sure if there's an overall benefit.

tl;dr: I'm not sure, . I'd say ten or even twenty-paragraph posts are fine to put on a single page, but longer articles and articles with a lot of images are probably better to be split over pages for performance reasons.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Thanks, dude. That was very helpful.

I agree, by the way, that content "popping in" as it comes into view can be jarring. I prefer multiple pages to that sort of thing.

 

[Cthulhu]

It's not hard to avoid on a decent connection either, just start downloading shit before you're about to see the image pop in, etc. There's also sites that have the lazy loading on, but they fade the images in, which is also nicer.

 

[I Am Not Me]

I'm just wondering...

Didn't the frontpage used to have a link to affiliates somewhere around there? I can't find it now.

Or I just suck at navigation.

Was it removed altogether?