New SOTT FrontPage Design

[luc]

I really like the new design - less "cluttered" and thus more "modern". Congratulations!

 

[dreamer]

I also like the new design, and think it looks clearer now.

 

[rs]

I notice with the new design that for some reason, on both my iPhone and iPad, the entire right column (starting with "Latest News") does not render. Is this going to be fixed?

thanks

 

[Scottie]

I notice with the new design that for some reason, on both my iPhone and iPad, the entire right column (starting with "Latest News") does not render. Is this going to be fixed?

thanks

That was normal... Now the sidebar appears at the bottom of page on mobile gizmos.

 

[rs]

I notice with the new design that for some reason, on both my iPhone and iPad, the entire right column (starting with "Latest News") does not render. Is this going to be fixed?

thanks

That was normal... Now the sidebar appears at the bottom of page on mobile gizmos.

Well, I'm not sure why there should be such a difference, but it still does not work on my iPad. I do see the right hand column at the bottom on my iPhone.

Why does the page render differently on mobile devices?

 

[Sol Logos]

I notice with the new design that for some reason, on both my iPhone and iPad, the entire right column (starting with "Latest News") does not render. Is this going to be fixed?

thanks

That was normal... Now the sidebar appears at the bottom of page on mobile gizmos.

Well, I'm not sure why there should be such a difference, but it still does not work on my iPad. I do see the right hand column at the bottom on my iPhone.

Why does the page render differently on mobile devices?

Its usually called a responsive or sometimes an adaptive design, just means it responds to the device size based on content blocks priority. So if the side bar is less prioritised than the article content, it will stack lower on say a mobile view.

Any view to do something similar for the forum?

 

[rs]

I notice with the new design that for some reason, on both my iPhone and iPad, the entire right column (starting with "Latest News") does not render. Is this going to be fixed?

thanks

That was normal... Now the sidebar appears at the bottom of page on mobile gizmos.

Well, I'm not sure why there should be such a difference, but it still does not work on my iPad. I do see the right hand column at the bottom on my iPhone.

Why does the page render differently on mobile devices?

Its usually called a responsive or sometimes an adaptive design, just means it responds to the device size based on content blocks priority. So if the side bar is less prioritised than the article content, it will stack lower on say a mobile view.

Any view to do something similar for the forum?

It's probably me being a pain in the neck, but I loathe when web sites "do me a favor" and adapt to my device. They are guessing what I want, and they *always* guess wrong... For me, what I want is exactly the same experience, device independent.

 

[Scottie]

Any view to do something similar for the forum?

I'm hoping that I don't have to, because the next version of SMF is supposed to have full mobile-friendliness built in.

 

[Scottie]

It's probably me being a pain in the neck, but I loathe when web sites "do me a favor" and adapt to my device. They are guessing what I want, and they *always* guess wrong... For me, what I want is exactly the same experience, device independent.

Well, this is the problem. Some people complain they can't read the site on their phone/tablet, and they don't like to zoom. Others say they love it because mobile sites are silly. I'm more in this second crowd. I don't care if fonts are a little small, because I don't expect to read a web site perfectly on a 5" screen. Besides, that's what pinch-to-zoom is for! But that's me.

Some sites actually give you the option to disable the mobile theme, but they usually do this with a cookie. But, setting a cookie breaks our caching scheme. Other sites use a totally different subdomain, like "m.sott.net", but we can't do that either because each subdomain is a language (i.e. es.sott.net).

Well, if you are logged in to SOTT, I could certainly make an option to disable the mobile theme. But you'd have to be logged in for it to work.

But then that raises another question: a lot of mobile browsing should be done over SSL, encrypted, but SOTT also doesn't support full SSL browsing - again, because it breaks Level 2 of our super-duper caching scheme.

BUT... the new HTTP 2.0 scheme that was recently "finalized" basically means all web browsing will be over SSL in the future. At that point, I suspect caching systems will become much smarter out of necessity. We use Varnish to cache all not-logged-in requests, and it doesn't work over SSL. It CAN work over SSL theoretically, but their programmers need to make it happen. I think HTTP 2.0 will be the straw that breaks the camel's back in that respect, but we'll see.

And then, just designing a layout for mobile devices is a pain. You can have:

- 22" FullHD resolution display
- 5" FullHD display
- ~10" Retina display (even higher than FullHD)

How do you make a site look good on 2 different devices, both with the same actual screen resolution, but where one device has a 5" screen, and the other has a 22" screen? It's all rather ridiculous, actually.

This is all exactly why I resisted the mobile SOTT thing for so long. But, quite often now, over 50% of our traffic is mobile. That's up about 20% from 1 year ago. And more people wanted a simpler, easy-to-read design on their phone or tablet.

Well, that's the story.

I'm still thinking about how to make a "Disable the mobile theme" button/feature that gets around our caching limitations, without being logged in. Possibilities so far:

- http://www.sott.net/m/article-12345-This-is-an-article [note the "m" subdir]
- http://www.sott.net/article-12345-This-is-an-article?m=1 [note the "m=1" param at the end]

Both options have several problems, but I'm sure there's a clever way to get around them. I just have to figure out what that clever way is!

Anyway, you're not alone. And I'm still thinking about how to improve the mobileyness. Step 0 was to just get the mobile stuff up and running. Step 1 was to bring back the sidebar, albeit in a crappy way. Okay, that's all done. Step 2 is to figure out how to give mobilies the choice of the desktop look, or the mobile look. Stay tuned!

Oh, sometimes I have to clear the cache on my phone's browser to make it pull up the revised mobile stuff. Shouldn't be necessary, but browser caching is very fond of ignoring cache directives from servers these days.

 

[rs]

OK, so whining aside, is there an explanation why the whole right hand column simply disappears (on only my iPad)? I would be fine with whatever if I could see it at all. (Again, it works on my iPhone, which is weird because both my iPhone and iPad are Safari on iOS 8.)

 

[Scottie]

OK, so whining aside, is there an explanation why the whole right hand column simply disappears (on only my iPad)? I would be fine with whatever if I could see it at all. (Again, it works on my iPhone, which is weird because both my iPhone and iPad are Safari on iOS 8.)

Hmm... All phones and tablets should be detected, but maybe they aren't.

When a mobile gizmo is detected, the style of the page is dynamically changed so that the sidebar moves to the bottom of the page (before it disappeared as you noted), the Latest News columns stack on top of each other, and the font gets much bigger.

So, that's intentional to give people the kind of "mobile-friendly layout" that they apparently love so much. :P

 

[irjO]

OK, so whining aside, is there an explanation why the whole right hand column simply disappears (on only my iPad)? I would be fine with whatever if I could see it at all. (Again, it works on my iPhone, which is weird because both my iPhone and iPad are Safari on iOS 8.)

Hmm... All phones and tablets should be detected, but maybe they aren't.

When a mobile gizmo is detected, the style of the page is dynamically changed so that the sidebar moves to the bottom of the page (before it disappeared as you noted), the Latest News columns stack on top of each other, and the font gets much bigger.

So, that's intentional to give people the kind of "mobile-friendly layout" that they apparently love so much. :P

Yup, it is not like an anormal behavior, on my iphone seems like that (even with Chrome and Opera and on the other people phones that I tried looks the same!) and I think this layout is so much better to navigate on the mobile phone!

 

[rs]

Hmm... All phones and tablets should be detected, but maybe they aren't.

Is there a way to determine what my iPad is detected as? A web site that tells you "you are on a <blah>"?

 

[Scottie]

Hmm... All phones and tablets should be detected, but maybe they aren't.

Is there a way to determine what my iPad is detected as? A web site that tells you "you are on a <blah>"?

Go here:

http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/

And see what it reports at the top.

 

[irjO]

I noticed that there is an new "related articles" Box below the main article, but I think is not working quite right yet! I've check many articles and the "articles related" are not so related, some of them doesn't have anything to do with the info of the main article, are these algorithms you are using for this task getting better alone with time? just curious.