One of the most enjoyable parts of living in a post-port world for the tech team is the ease with which we can roll out changes. DK5 has a single button press, no down time deploy system and a clean new codebase, so its much easier to make changes and get them live. This means we have pushed out features a number of times since I last published deploy notes and will continue frequent pushes of improvements both large and small. Below is a list of everything that has gone up.
The highest priority continues to be browser page speed. We have had a few failed experiments trying to integrate some prebuilt speed improvements from Google and are now moving on to other options. We have already changed the image compression for uploaded images, will soon be working on as-you-scroll image loading, and will continue to rollout tweaks until the page speed comes down to an acceptable level.
As you have certainly noticed, the story and comment layouts have both been updated. Some story content and ad combinations resulted in a broken layout with a large gap in the middle of the story. The new story layout puts the ad outside the story content area, fixing this issue and making the story editor more WYSIWYG. Also, we were seeing high bounce rates- people hitting Daily Kos to read one story then leaving without checking out other content on the site- because there were so few options for further reading presented. So, we brought the sidebar back. The comment container got a little narrower in the process, so we broke up the comment meta data, putting some of it above the comment and some below. This has the nice effect of putting the author name next to the avatar and otherwise organizing the buttons and labels attached to comments in what I hope is a more legible way. The narrower comment container also means we will have to reduce the maximum level of nesting we can accommodate from eight to seven.
We still are committed to responding to the demand for the single comment view. In fact, it is next on the list. Currently, there are a few options on the table for how to best and most quickly get this accomplished. As a thought experiment to help us best understand the demand for this feature, please let me know your thoughts on the following question in the comments. If the story page along with the comments and their content all loaded instantly, would the current regime of loading the whole page anchored to the comment in question do the trick? This is purely a hypothetical, of course, but I think your answers to this question will be very helpful to the design process.
We are starting the process of designing slideshows for photo heavy stories. Please let me know if you have any specific use cases we should support or features you would like to see. Our initial thoughts are to keep it simple- any photo in the story could be clicked, bringing up a light-box slideshow of all the images in the story with next/previous buttons. I’ll be auditing image heavy stories on Daily Kos and other sites and hope to write up my thoughts soon.
Release Notes
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Added tools for optimizing image compression to improve page speed
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Improvements in error reporting so we can respond more quickly to bugs
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Fixed bug with republishing stories that were incorrectly marked as spam
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Hide the right sidebar at small screen sizes on the story page
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Story pages now have sidebar with recommended and most shared stories
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Comments are now left-justified eliminating whitespace
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Changed appearance of Facebook, Twitter, comment and recommend buttons
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Track when stories are queued or scheduled for auditing when problems occur
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Improvements to tweet loading
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Tweaks to improve story page display on different browsers and mobile devices
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Very small images which are selected as the story's main image now display at the right of the story rather than above it (very small images did not look good displayed above the story)
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Restyled sidebars for cleaner look
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Other style tweaks in major overhaul of story page appearance
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Added popup in story editor that appears when the cursor hovers over links. The popup has a clickable link to check that the link goes to the correct page
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Increase maximum size for uploading to image library to 10MB. Images in stories, however will continue to be automatically resized and compressed versions of the uploaded image.
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Removed the unread comment count from the top nav bar, now uses the orange dot indicator instead
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Fixes and tweaks for ads
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Added ability to collapse and expand sidebar sections, and make those choices sticky
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Fixed visited link color so that it is more easily visible
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Fixed block quote background color so that text and links are easier to read
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Fixed problems that allowed stories to be scheduled when they were in an invalid state (for example, missing tags)
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Comments now respect user preference to have them load collapsed
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Added controls to story page above comments to change the preference for loading comments collapsed
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Added controls to story page so that user can change preference for viewing hidden comments (if the user is allowed to view hidden comments)
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Fixed several small errors that were creating a lot of noise, making it hard to see the important ones
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Fixed infrastructure problems that caused unintentional downtime during deploys
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Expand/collapse control that was missing from tip jar added, making it easier to rec the tip jar
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Changed "My diaries" link to "My stories" in nav bar dropdown
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Fixed bug in which tables pasted in to the editor would be too large or overflow
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Fixed a bug with live update dialog box, which was not showing up reliably
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Fixed problem with embedded tweet images that was causing errors
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Added a control that links to the list view of the blog at the top of each one for easily switching over to the list view
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Removed comments count square in user profile dropdown
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Fixed problem with despaminate reversal tool for false positives
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When a story is queued to a blog, we'll display an error message if the story is not publishable
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New comment design. Comment tree now has 7 nested levels
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Poll votes are now tallied more accurately, moving forward
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Fixed a bug where the story would not display properly if tags were broken