We have a new front page design!

[Tetsujin]

So fresh, so shiny.

 

[Flare]

Looks fabulous guys, awesome job <3 So neeewww

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I wasn't at all crazy about the idea of revamping the front page, but it's hard to argue with the results. It's gorgeous. Looks and feels very sleek.

If I could make a suggestion for improvement, though (and this may be something that's planned to be addressed soon anyway), I don't care for how the "Analysis," "Translations," etc. links from the navigation menu take you to a page of articles tagged as such presented in reverse order of post-date (and with only a few articles per page). It makes finding specific things very difficult, while it had been easy in the previous design. This is also highly counterintuitive.

For one very important example, the only reliable way to now navigate to the master list of guidebook translations related to FFVII is to go from the Toggle Menu to "Compendium," then to "Guide Book Translations" rather than just clicking "Translations" and being taken to all your choices. Not at all what you'd expect if you were new to the site and had come here after being told by a friend to check out the translations.

Perhaps less notable, but no less concerning for navigation, there's now no way at all to access non-FFVII translations short of already having the URL or going through several pages of news posts. I had to go to page 5 under "Translations" to find the FFVIII Ultimania stuff, and to page 10 for the FFIX Ultimania stuff.

I hate to be the wet blanket here, as the new design is unquestionably a step up, and I offer kudos to those of you who were involved. Even with the current navigation/presentation issues, I will call this a very strong start to improving the site going forward.

 

[Lex]

the top menu is still far from finalised

Definitely something that still needs to be addressed properly, but we need to have a good think about how, because I think we're trying to avoid drop-down menus again.

 

[Jason Tandro]

This is god damned beautiful. Well done guys!


Minor thing I need to update my staff bio. I wrote that back when I was the Fan Works Editor which tells you how long ago that was, lol.

 

[hleV]

I think it would be nice for the page and the forum to become more similar beyond just coloring.

Could start with fonts. In the page the font is usually bigger, though I'm pretty sure it's a whole different font than the one used in the forum.

 

[Lex]

That's something we can keep in mind for the forum upgrade, which is in stasis like everything else we do

 

[Flintlock]

I tidied up a couple more articles today and I'll keep plugging away. Lex and I between us will soon have done everything back to the 31st of October, 2015. I don't intend to stop at that point but I'll probably slow down and turn my attention to other things, like the menu. I also keep finding tiny bugs in the theme which have so far proved easy to fix (knock on wood). Stuff like lists having a font size of 1.2 em while body text is at 1.1 em.

 

[ForceStealer]

It looks fantastic guys. Great work

 

[Cthulhu]

That's something we can keep in mind for the forum upgrade, which is in stasis like everything else we do

Except the front page redesign

 

[Cthulhu]

Spoiler: Chrome will start displaying warnings on TLS soonish

better get on that https thingy

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I tidied up a couple more articles today and I'll keep plugging away. Lex and I between us will soon have done everything back to the 31st of October, 2015.

I've been meaning to ask, what all does this entail?

 

[Cthulhu]

Aight, we have https now . I've set it up so it'll automagically redirect to the https version, too.

ATM browsers will still give a warning of sorts though; images and other resources are often loaded using http, instead of https. From now on, when creating links, including resources, etc, prefer to use the https prefix. For HTML elements like images, you should even be able to exclude the protocol completely, e.g. make it `//thelifestream.net` (iirc). I'll go through some stuff now and fix stuff where possible. I'll also set up auto-renew for the certificate, given how it's only valid for 3 months.

edit: the automagic redirect is actually HSTS, which is more of a hint to the user's browser that there is a https version available and it should prefer it; I'll set up a permanent redirect later.

edit 2: http/2 is now also supported. This allows a browser to re-use an established connection to load multiple files (in parallel), reducing HTTP overhead. It should make the site feel a bit snappier. Network graph went from

Spoiler: this

to

Spoiler: this

. IDK if that means anything but hey . I'll have to check whether optimizing / minifying resources is still valuable now.

time to load event has reduced from ~1.6 seconds to ~0.9 seconds, so thater's that.

 

[Flintlock]

As I mentioned in the front page article requirements thread, the best practice for linking to local content is to omit the domain and TLD altogether, i.e. a front page article that links to the forum could use

<a href="/forums/showthread.php?p=123">thread</a>

@Tres: changing featured images to 16:9, making sure categories and tags are correct, standardising titles and removing custom styling, mostly. An example of the latter is that vader used to make links in his podcast articles appear in blue with an underline. Now that we have a new theme the blue is barely visible. By not setting a manual colour at all the link just shows up with the colour I chose to be used site-wide.

 

[Cthulhu]

Aight, TLS front page has no http images or anything anymore.

I did spot a small issue in this article, where a resource is loaded from the test site (https://test.thelifestream.net/wp-content/themes/fraction-theme/images/no-banner-728x90.jpg)

It also tries to load font files off of http://fonts.googleapis.com/, which is also blocked due to not being secure / https; I haven't been able to find where that is referred to, but it's probably somewhere in the theme and someone more knowledgeable with the codez could probably find it easily.

edit: forums are now also green lock wossname. Well, mostly, when someone includes an image via http it still gives a warning, but that should be fine.

 

[Flintlock]

Yeah, those are both because of the theme, though I don't know why it's trying to load that "no banner" image at all; I'll look into that. Edit: oh, it's a banner ad. I'll disable it it for the time being. Note to self: turn off uBlock for TLS.

There is a secure version of the Google Fonts API so that should be relatively easy to fix. Edit: made some changes. Let me know if it works (might take a while due to server-side caching).

 

[Flintlock]

Double post, but: Pixel, your new banner is up. (Everyone else, you probably won't notice the difference, but three bright dots have been removed from under the text.) Sorry it took a while.

 

[Cthulhu]

Yase, that fixxed it, thanks .


mmm green lock icon. I never really pay attention to it, but, it's nice to finally have it. Should've done this aeons ago, it was pretty straightforward thanks to Let's Encrypt, an automagic installer / updater, and simple configuration in the webserverer.

 

[Lex]

The redesign has already done what I'd hoped it would do: galvanise me to want to write more articles. Hopefully it works its magic on other people XD.

I won't scratch the itch until I've finished off what I was fixing in the articles, but the itch is there. Hooray!

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Very nice new look.

 

[Jason Tandro]

The redesign has already done what I'd hoped it would do: galvanise me to want to write more articles. Hopefully it works its magic on other people XD.

I won't scratch the itch until I've finished off what I was fixing in the articles, but the itch is there. Hooray!

Already scouring my brain for the next Editorial topic.

Side note- uh where do I go to login to Site Admin. I was just logging in from the Site Admin button at the bottom of the front page but I no longer see it there. Apologies if this is already answered elsewhere.

 

[Fangu]

It was there before I think? Someone must have removed it.

Anyway https://thelifestream.net/wp-admin/ will always work.

You can also find a Log in link with any comment form section, like on https://thelifestream.net/about/.

 

[Flintlock]

Should probably turn off comments on pages like that. Would there be any reason not to turn comments off for *all* pages, actually? (Note that pages and articles are two different beasts.)

But yeah, there's no dashboard login link visible to the public any more by design. Just bookmark the wp-admin link Fangu posted above. Once you're logged, a toolbar will display on the site for easy access &#8211; you can also turn the toolbar off from your profile if you don't want it.

 

[Flintlock]

Yop, could you set up HSTS/HTTPS for test.thelifestream.net as well? I can't access it at all right now.

 

[Cthulhu]

I think so, let me see what I can do.

edit: that should do it. nginx configuration is still a bit magic for me but this seems to work. test.thelifestream.net has a different certificate from the main domain, if that is relevant to anyone.