In response to my own wishes as well as to some good suggestions made by readers, the website designer is still working on this venue. You’ll notice that the banner at the top is larger, the space between the sidebars is wider, and that the text with hyperlinks is less glaringly obvious, being red but not red and bold. You may not have noticed that you can now drag photos from the posts to the desktop, which you used to be able to do but which disappeared during the upgrade. (If you can’t drag a photo that way, simply click on it to make it bigger, and that will work.)
We’re also working on several other suggestions, including putting up the time of posting as well as the date, trying to ensure that the “next post” and “previous post” links are now at the top of each post instead of the bottom, and other things I won’t mention. It’s a work in progress, but I think it’s a lot better than it was.
The most requested feature was that readers wanted a way to edit their comments, and you now have 15 minutes to do so after putting them up, which allows you to fix typos but not alter things in response to stuff that appears later.
Stay tuned, and if you have other suggestions, please put them as comments below. Thanks to the website designer for all the work.
One feature that would be nice would be the possibility of underlining, bolding and/or italicizing text within our messages.
You can, can’t you?
HeYou would say that, wouldn’theyou?(With apologies to Ms. M. Rice-Davies.)
But where are the strikethrough codes? The simple version,
.del and /del
Between brackets (and by brackets, I mean sideways carets).
(With apologies to Ms. M. Rice-Davies.)
As a child still at primary school, I would amuse adults by singing a topical song, about which I new nothing other than recognizing the names I had heard on the wireless. It was sung to the tune of ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’
How do you do that??!
You can just use standard html tags, e.g. see here.
Ah, OK, thanks. I don’t do coding in html, so this is very useful.
Yes, it would be nice if there were a little text editor. Not sure if WP supports that. You can always use the HTML codes (remove the periods, which I have to use so they show up): text, text, and text.
And that didn’t work. Basically, the codes are pairs placed before and after the text in open and close chevrons: . The begin code is just b, u, or i, in the chevrons (no spaces), and the end code is the same, but with a forward slash before the letter: /b, /i, /u. See the example here.
It look like they’ve broken the ability to put in les than and greeter than even with HTML entities
Oh, that’s naughty. I’m getting “Invalid security token” when I try to post entities. You too, or something different (I’ve got very lax settings on both NoScript and uBlockOrigin, the only code being banned is Facebooks’).
Why would you want to have the “next post” and “previous post” links above the article? Don’t you want to go to the next post when you have reached the end of the current post?
I can think of arguments for putting the Next/Previous links in both places. As you suggest, it might be nice to click to go to the next article after reading to the end of one. However, it is also nice to be able to navigate from post to post without having to scroll to the bottom to find the links. (Actually, the link is not at the bottom but between the article and the comments.) This often occurs when you want to find a recent post that you’ve already read but need to read again, comment, or click on a link in the content.
I would personally prefer to have them up top. This is b/c I visit several Xs a day, so most times I am looking for either something specific or something new.
Wait… the Next and Previous links have just now appeared in both places.
What is this magic???
It’s called a “web designer”.
🙂
I must defend my (aberrant?) WEITreading habits, and expand on the reasons other commenters have given for having previous and next post indications: Readers use WEIT for a variety of purposes, not just reading posts sequentially, which isn’t to disparage those who do; but here’s much valuable information (scientific, historical and and otherwise) in the posts. I needn’t go into detail here. I think the need should be obvious.
Any chance of bringing back the old icon that used to appear on my Favorites bar? Of what use is the generic W, if someone has more than one WordPress website on their Favorites bar? So far, all I have now is two close variants of the characteristic “W.”
The WP icon appears initially, then switches to PCCe’s logo after I scroll thru articles, at least on my Google Chrome.
I get Ceiling Cat straight away using Edge.
I like all the innovations, thanks Jerry and Web Designer. All I miss now is the WP bar across the top with the bell notification thingie.
All hail the excellent work of the website designer! I am impressed by anyone who can undo the idiocy of WordPress.
You could do with a WEIT “icon” (not sure what they’re called, the thing in the browser tab) rather than the default WordPress one.
You refer to the “Favicon”.
Good point! The old website had one so it presumably can be reused.
Presumably that would be Ceiling Cat.
An upside-down cat hanging from the top of the favicon box would be perfect!
Lo, and unto us was delivered the power to edit. Rejoice!
I agree. I’ve had to use it several times already for typos.
I’m so happy with the ability to edit comments, I am tempted to screw up on purpose! 😉
Amatuer!
This is the one thing I miss about the new website.
To answer Nap’s question … I am more interested in some articles than others so it would be nice to be able to scroll through the articles more quickly. This is especially true if there is an article that I want to see again that is from a few days ago.
edit … I just noticed it’s there YIPEE … thankyou
There are still eight active fingerprinting methods for personal identification of users.
Thanks . Good improvements
Thanks for all the good work on the WEIT website. Very much improved.
😀😽
One thing that needs fixing is that we can no longer put less than signs ad greater than signs in our comments. It comes up with “Invalid security token when we use the HTML entity & lt; for example.
Same issue here, with presumably different settings on my site-scripting controls. Same symptom.
This is weird. I just left a note on another WEIT post that had both the less than and greater than symbols. On this page, however, it fails.
Try typing a left angle bracket in a comment. It won’t appear.
Just a little test: bold, italics, underlined,
strikethrough.I had the same “Invalid security token” problem on this comment initially. Turns out, it was not griping about the above HTML bold text etc; it was griping about the Greek lower-case beta in my signature. I changed the sig to “bPer” and the error went away and the edit timer started. I copied the full comment in and hit Save. This time, no “Invalid security token”!
So, in short, prepare your comment externally. If you get the “Invalid security token” error, try again with a dummy/plain text message and then edit it with the full, rich comment.
BTW, I use the Firefox add-on called bbCodeWebex to make it easy to mark text as bold, etc, add links and much more.
βPer
Ok, interesting. When I first posted the above comment, I got the “Invalid security token” error. After some experimentation, I determined that the error wasn’t triggered by the text marked as bold, italics, etc.; it was the lower-case Greek beta in my signature at the bottom! I changed the signature to “bPer” and the comment was accepted! With the edit timer counting, I just changed the signature back to “bPer” and it was accepted!
So, I recommend that, if you use rich text or links or HTML-encoded characters in your comments, you remember to copy the entire comment before hitting “Post Comment”. If you get the “Invalid security token” error, clean out the rich text etc., post the comment, then edit back in the rich text, etc. Ugly, but it seems to work.
bPer
One last time …
This edit feature has some rough edges. When I posted the comment two up from here, it looked good in edit mode but when I refreshed the page, it ended up looking like my first rough test, without the full commentary and without an edit option. So I added the above comment to flesh out the commentary again, leaving out the Greek lower-case betas in my user handle (expecting to be able to edit it). Again, some of my edits disappeared and rendered one of my sentences incoherent. I give up.
bPer
Not only all that, but the little icon thingy on my browser toolbar is different!
Praise be the web developer!
The favicon is back!
Yes, it’s back but is it the old one or a new one? It isn’t very readable in my browser (Chrome). Someone might want to create a more distinctive and readable one.
“Ask and ye shall receive.” —Ceiling Cat
Here’s an idea on how to improve the favicon. Take the four letters, WEIT, and place them in this arrangement:
WE
I T
Give each letter the same color as in the title: red, brown, red, red. The background should be the same as the background of the site, a pale yellow. It might be cool to rotate the “E” a bit as evolution is the operative word here. On the other hand, it might make the letter unreadable.
I say NO! Don’t mess with the recognizable brand!
There seems to be an issue with Safari (latest version on Big Sur) where you don’t get both check boxes so I cannot get notified of new posts on the site.
I use the latest versions and have both check boxes, if by “both” you mean 1) Notify me of new comments via email, and 2) Notify me of new posts via email. There is a third check box: “Save my name, email, and website in this browser….”
Which of these are you missing?
Are you using Big Sur?
Yes
I get the “new comments” option, and I still get my email for each new posting.
What I am missing is that the Gravatar/ WordPress (I’m not sure which) function which told me if someone had replied to a comment I posted.
Quite a conversation-killer, that one.
What browser are you using? It works in Chrome for me but not Safari (that I see the two boxes).
I’ve found a work-around, Aidan. I log into WordPress using subscribe.wordpress.com, and the notification bell is there in its old position on the bar top right. So each day I can check this from time to time for replies, particularly if I’ve made a serious comment, rather than my usual frivolous ones.
Of course, I’ve just realised that you are now unlikely to see this helpful reply! Let me know if you do, please.
Is it possible to make hyperlinks a little more obvious? I’m colorblind and cannot distinguish the red text from the black.
Which variety of colour blind?
There are a small mountain of applications and tools for web designers to use to check their page templates for usability under various forms of colour blindness. They don’t get used very often, because customers frequently simply don’t specify that it should be a factor to consider.
If you use Windows 10, go to Settings, Ease of Access, Color Filters. Turn on color filters, then click the radio button appropriate to your color blindness type. I find that it helps my deuteranopia, though the links are still not as clear as they used to be. It also makes the orange idiot even more scary 🙂
I wouldn’t scale the banner in that manner, that makes it fuzzy because it’s being scaled beyond its resolution, ie, the number of pixels it contains. If you want it at that size then the original vector version has to be used to create a larger bitmap version.
Alternately, you can make an SVG version of it, which is a scalable vector format which modern browsers understand. If the original vector document was created in an application such as Adobe Illustrator, it can be saved as SVG.
My personal opinion however is that it doesn’t need to be scaled. The original size was fine.
New editing feature is great.
The revised website is clean and readable. It also looks on my phone. I rarely read much on my phone but it is a good indicator of how readable a website is.
The Gravatar/ WordPress (I’m not sure which) function for informing a user that one or more of their previous posts has attracted new replies (to that post, not necessarily new threads of comments to a page) has disappeared.
I used to get a beacon in the gravatar/ wordpress header to the page when I’d received a reply. So I’d finish what I was doing, then go and consider that response(s). No more.
Yes! I was going to mention that very thing.
It was useful.
Thanks for the good work!
The changes are good, and the edit countdown clock is excellent.
Be careful, though, to not make us do anything DIFFERENTLY. I can’t tell you how many “improvements” in tech I run into which require me to do stuff differently. Or fill everything with even MORE advertising (not a problem here, thank goodness). So, kudos, this is still the best part of my day.
Now let me get those damn kids off my lawn!
D.A. NYC
(and I’m still only 50! — and I don’t even have a lawn!)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/