Saturday Debugging
This is just a quick update on the state of the site.
Things are, as predicted, much better on the new host. The horrible proxy errors are gone, and things are much more harmonious. There were some lingering issues from the migration that took a few weeks to quash (we went an entertainingly long time without the ability to delete spam comments), but we’ve now got that sorted and are moving forward, with the current priority being making comments less awful and fixing the variety of display bugs (especially on mobile). Yes, replacing those captchas is first on the list. Look forward to it!
If you have any questions about the technical side of things, feel free to ask in the (currently still frustrating) comments.
January 10, 2016 @ 3:27 am
Yaaay, better captures.
January 10, 2016 @ 5:52 am
Thank you, Anna, for all your hard work at keeping this place running.
January 10, 2016 @ 10:53 am
Thanks for all your hard work Anna.
I do have a question, but it’s kind of unrelated to the site; I just thought I’d put it to you because you’re so much better with computers than I am.
This avatar shows up because of Gravatar, right? That’s good: I like my online presence to have a face. I would also rather like it if that face were my own. The problem is, I don’t want it to show up on every site I use, and if I changed it now, that would be the case. Is there a way of customising Gravatar so that you can choose which avatars you have for which site? Or does that defeat the point of it?
If that’s the case, I suppose I’ll just have to create a new email address, or be lazy and stick to Jenna Coleman.
January 10, 2016 @ 12:29 pm
Is there a reason you’re not offloading the comments to Disqus like the rest of the internet does nowadays? Curious more than anything else, not sure what I’d do if I was still in the business of setting up websites.
January 10, 2016 @ 9:57 pm
By my request. I just don’t like Disqus, basically. Seen too many sites where it appears to misbehave, slow down, and generally fuck up the site experience. Most notably a while when multiple sites using Disqus would repeatedly cause my browser to jump down to the comment section on an article. Every few seconds. No matter how many times I tried to scroll back up to read it.
January 10, 2016 @ 10:23 pm
Yeah, I can back that up. I’ve used Disqus before and wouldn’t recommend it at all. It’s hideous. It would take about half a day to post comments, meaning that there was no such thing as live discussion. After a couple of months I changed it to Livefyre, which is a bit better, but buggy in whole new ways. I think Anna probably made the best choice here, keeping it simple.
(And yes, I sussed Gravatar. Go me.)
January 10, 2016 @ 10:36 pm
Oh Christ, that’s a hideous avatar. My eyes are like cesspools. I’m new around here Phil and I’m already cramping your style. I’m so sorry.
January 11, 2016 @ 1:43 am
My style is bug-ridden and off-topic.
January 11, 2016 @ 12:37 pm
Yeah, pretty much all the sites where I read the comments (mostly webcomics) have abandoned Disqus because everyone hates it.
January 11, 2016 @ 1:54 pm
The only thing that might be useful about it is as a central place to review posted comments and any replies. I can never remember what, when or where I’ve posted anything – which is why I don’t always respond when people reply to me (sorry about that!)
Mind you only 3 of the blogs I frequent use Disqus anyway so it’s not that useful for me anyway.
I seems like there should be a better way of tracking ones own comments across the internet in any case though …