Ladies and gentlemen, we have progress.
As previously acknowledged on this blog, and discussed at length elsewhere, an unacceptable number of flaws remain in our blog software – for readers, commenters and bloggers themselves. So, to help us turn Nature Network into the blogging platform you all deserve, we recently hired an expert in Movable Type 4, the software that underlies our platform. He’s now deployed the first round of fixes to our test server. We thought we’d share a few screen grabs with you, to show that we have made substantial and quick progress from where we were just a week ago.
Note: Ian’s Meandering Scholar blog was chosen purely at random for these mock-ups.
Custom banners
Currently, every Nature Network blog looks pretty much the same, topped and tailed with the standard red livery. Come the new release, you’ll have full access rights to upload any banner image you like to spruce up the top of your pages and give your blog its own distinctive look. Matt and Lou will provide full instructions on how to do this and will be happy to assist with selecting, resizing or adding the banner.
Comment Editor
Some people have experienced problems with adding images and formatting in the comments section. With the new release, not only will you be able to add these elements with either HTML or Textile markup, you’ll also be presented with a handy box of icons like this:
All you need to do then is highlight the text and click the appropriate icon. The box can be hidden if you’d rather stick to typing.
Blog rolls
Some bloggers like to maintain a visible list of their favourite blogs and other web sites, a feature commonly referred to as a blog roll. With the new release, this will become possible on Nature Network.
When can you expect these changes?
The next scheduled release is in about two weeks, which gives us time to add still more improvements (such as speeding up load times) and thoroughly testing all these changes. It may be that the custom headers take slightly longer to implement on the live site as they have other dependencies, but we’ll keep you updated with exact dates as soon as we know them. If there are any small delays with the headers, they won’t delay getting the other features to you.
Then what?
This is just a starting point. We are utterly committed to turning things around and setting up all the features you’ve asked for that we can reasonably support. The next thing we’ll move on to is better stats reporting, so bloggers have a clearer idea of their traffic. We’ve already identified a module for Movable Type that will help with this, and we hope to have it running on our test servers soon. We’ll also look at the various options for lowering the barrier to commenting. We hear loud and clear that this is a priority for many of you, and so we’ll make it a priority to investigate a range of potential solutions. We have also identified a possible solution that may resolve the issue with needing to login to each individual blog to comment – more updates on these features next week. Finally, ongoing bugs that are affecting individuals are also being investigated – you will receive personal email updates as we make progress on the particular issue you reported.
🙂
Thanks for the update. Even if this is a promisary note, it’s good to see that there’s progress.
Of course, if this doesn’t appear in 2 weeks time, I won’t be able to hold Ian back – I’m sure he’s looking forward to having his new banner up there.
Useful update, thanks. Sounds good. Fingers crossed.
OK, I am flattered enough to give in.
I love you all.
…I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille…..
wow. genuine old-fashioned communication (using a new fangled medium). it’s great to hear updates, especially when they tell of progress being made.
Just to make this clear right now: I will have watercress in my banner. Anyone who does it after I’ve posted this is a copycat.
The updates seem interesting..!
as far as banner is concerned.. I will go for artistic arrangements of Eppies with colorful loading dyes (and failed PCR products!)..
Nice one Steffi!
Many thanks for that (weekly) update Lou. 😉
It’s good to hear that things are coming. I estimate the proportions of the banner image are 965 × 100, if people want to start experimenting with images…
I wonder if it would be possible (perhaps on the blogger’s forum) to post and maintain a complete list of the planned MT4 fixes and feature implementations. People could then check this against their own lists/experience and suggest items to be added?
As far as banner sizes go, there’s a funky tool whereby you can select the area that you wish to use as the banner from a larger image so you shouldn’t need to worry about dimensions too much.
@Stephen, I’ll see what I can do about transferring our complete working list to the bloggers forum – it’s not quite as easy as it sounds because of the way our bug tracking system works. In any case, rest assured that everything that was reported in the feedback forum has been noted. You can check here and here for some of the key issues. Do continue to post there if you think of any additional improvements or spot any more bugs.
Thank you, Lou! I am excited already! 🙂
Whee! Looks like fun – and we did believe the changes were coming (at least, if we believed you and M@, since you’ve written so many many times), but there’s always a bit of reticence and concern relative to faceless decision-makers higher up in some sort of conspiratorial nebula who might pull the plug on anything anyhow. And tangible, visible progress is always preferable to “we’re on it” reassurances. It gets to be a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.
I know all about it because I am horribly guilty of doing the same – saying yes to lots of collaborations and then not living up to my end of the bargain in various ways, usually involving writing. Which is why I am trying to keep commenting down, and break the blogging habit. Hard to remain disciplined though when things are moving thus.
Look at that, a
howl from beyondcommunication about improvements to NN blogs.That all seems like good progress.
Holy spambots, Batman!
Lou, did you see the last 4 spam comments made over the period of a month, following Richard Wintle’s comment? So much for requiring people to sign in!!
Thanks for the heads up, Kausik – spam zapped.
Maybe we should plan on migrating to a different blogging platform, such as WordPress, instead of Movable Type.
Jackie – the majority of the tech problems we’ve had aren’t because of using MT, but rather because of trying to link up all the differenet NPG-systems that we have in the background. This would be the case whatever platform we use. However, if you’re referring to the recent news about MT’s acquisition by "SayMedia":https://www.movabletype.org/2010/09/introducing_say_media_good_news_for_advertisers_and_publishe.html then we’re obviously aware of this and watching things closely.
Lou, weird thing happening while posting! If I set the text-input area to "Rich Text" and use simple CSS along with HTML to format the post, once I publish the post, the CSS gets completely screwed up. Oddly placed new font tags are created, and a new class tag called "Apple-style Span" suddenly inserts itself into those font tags. The hyperlinks in my post were all converted to a Sans-serif font when the post was published, although I specified a serif font for the whole post. Would you, or anyone in your team, have any idea why this is happening?
I had to manually correct all the markups – it was such a waste of time, but I couldn’t leave it as it was, because the published post was looking awful with oddly sized fonts and strange formatting.
Also, in the WYSIWIG mode of the editor, if I highlight a string of words, and click on the B/I buttons above to make them bold or italicize them, nothing happens. If, similarly, I click on the link button to create a hyperlink, inexplicably the hyperlink gets created at the beginning of the paragraph – with the text of the URL as the linked text, instead of what I highlighted. Verra, verra strange!!
This doesn’t happen in the SOURCE mode of the editor, though.
I am exiting about this.it’s terrific!
Useful update, thanks. Sounds good.
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