Back to previous post: Fast forward

Go to Making Light's front page.

Forward to next post: And while we’re on the subject

Subscribe (via RSS) to this post's comment thread. (What does this mean? Here's a quick introduction.)

December 4, 2011

Rearranging Light
Posted by Patrick at 06:37 PM * 79 comments

We’re moving some of the furniture. Don’t be surprised if the site briefly looks odd over the next little while. Your browser is not to blame.

Comments on Rearranging Light:
#1 ::: Xopher HalfTongue ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 07:13 PM:

Your browser is not to blame.

Unless it's Internet Explorer. That's to blame for all things, including global warming and Newt Gingrich.

#2 ::: Jacque ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:11 PM:

...especially if it's an old version of IE. (Ah, the joys of working for local government....)

#3 ::: FaultyMemory ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:13 PM:

Parhelia, phosphenes and diffractions.

Congrats and kudos to our many hosts.

#4 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:14 PM:

I really like the exploding gerbil fireworks, though -- hope that becomes a regular part of the site. The dragons are overdone.

#5 ::: P J Evans ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:18 PM:

2
We finally got upgraded this fall to IE8. We'd been using IE6, and things were starting to break. (When I left Friday afternoon, the tech guy was installing Office 2007 on my machine, upgrading from 2003.)

#6 ::: elise ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:32 PM:

Patrick, I am reminded of conversations about furniture and about it being OK to get furniture that... what was the phrase again?

#7 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:46 PM:

Well, I see Abi's got her own sidebar, and is already using it well!

#8 ::: Mark D. ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:46 PM:

Re Browsers: should I upgrade my Firefox (currently running 3.6.24)? I have hesitated - the new tabs look....odd. Or is there something better these days?

Signed,
Old School

#9 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:49 PM:

Ah, and Jim and Avram as well! Cool!

#10 ::: The Modesto Kid ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 08:51 PM:

Ooh, how exciting!

#11 ::: Larry ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 09:06 PM:

Xopher @#1: IE is the bane of my existence. I recently convinced work to drop support for IE 6. Google Analytics saved me!

Mark D @#8 : You probably should, what add ons do you use? That is the real concern that it may break something.

I like the new sidebar setup.

#12 ::: MacAllister ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 09:45 PM:

Hurray for progress! :) We'll be here to help sweep up the sawdust, when the construction is finished.

#13 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 10:22 PM:

Thank you, Mac.

Elise, I remember that conversation very well. You asked why we didn't own any furniture that didn't hurt. This led to the Ikea sofa, easy chair, and footstool. Life has been better ever since.

Just wait until you see the new standing mixer. I can hear that the engine needs cleaning. The screw that lets you open the case is front and center and large and shiny. I like that. I really like that.

On the site changes:

The current question is how to word the comment box so it's clear that:

1. Abi has All Possible Authority when acting as moderator.

2. Abi is usually the moderator you'll wind up dealing with. Unless you're a spammer, in which case you are in Jim Macdonald's hands, and your foot shall slide in due time.

3. If Abi hands you off to Teresa, do not take it as a reprieve.

#14 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 10:24 PM:

Woah! Patrick has reworded the comment box.

#15 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 10:33 PM:

Note: Teresa learned a significant amount of what she knows about moderation from watching the GEnie SFRT moderator, Yog Sysop, a.k.a. Jim Macdonald.

The most important thing she learned is that a good moderator is someone who keeps bad behavior from happening in the first place.

#16 ::: P J Evans ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 10:45 PM:

Seconding 8, since FF keeps telling me it's now up to version 8.x, and why don't I upgrade.

#17 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 10:52 PM:

Why you should upgrade: security.

I tried switching to Chrome, but the back-end interfaces of the Macmillan sites I moderate won't run on it.

#18 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 11:00 PM:

Hey Xopher, I was watching a Yale open course lecture from their "Early Modern England" series on YouTube, and the lecturer digressed into talking about a court case involving Christian Hatton, her traveling cows Brownie and Fillpail, and the postmortem legal dispute over the cows brought by three households of her descendants. You and Patrick both have much cooler ancestors than I do.

#19 ::: P J Evans ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 11:46 PM:

Teresa, I use Chrome at work, because it doesn't require Flash to use streetview - and I use that feature to find stuff like this. (Yes, that is a clutch of gas meters.)

#20 ::: FaultyMemory ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2011, 11:46 PM:

tnh@13: Angelfire doesn't like deep-linking to its images; following the link results in display of an image other than the intended. Is there a different image host you can use?

Also, in the comment box, there is a strongly emphasized and, along with several strongly emphasized commas, the emphasis of which may not be intentional.

#21 ::: elise ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 01:22 AM:

The new comment box cracks me up. Well done! and SO TRUE.

#22 ::: Jacque ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 01:29 AM:

Why do I feel moved to say, "Ruh-Roah!"

#23 ::: Wrye ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 04:49 AM:

I look forward to the settling of dust!

#24 ::: John Mark Ockerbloom ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 08:02 AM:

Mozilla is still providing security patches for the 3.6.* line of Firefox. Any later release is only supported for a few weeks after initial release, so when Firefox 9 comes out in a couple of weeks, Firefox 8 (released last month) gets end-of-lifed: no security patches or other updates for it.

So if you want a Firefox browser with stable features that still gets critical security updates, you might want to stick with FF 3.6.* for now. If you (and your add-ons) are fine with new features being released (and old ones potentially changing or going away) every few weeks, you can switch to 8-- but then try to either check regularly for updates or go to auto-upgrade. Right now, once you're off of 3.6, you'll have to stay on the upgrade treadmill to have a secure browser. (Note that Chrome has always been this way; that browser auto-upgrades on a regular basis.)

This may change in the future, as Mozilla is now realizing that some people (particularly enterprise users) really do want to have a stable version that has a lifespan closer to a typical hamster's than to a typical butterfly's. So there are now plans for an "extended support release" to be quietly provided sometime in early 2012 (possibly Firefox 10, but that's not definite yet). They don't plan to advertise it widely, but it'll continue to get security patches for the better part of a year even as new FF versions come out.

Until then, I'm sticking to 3.6.* on the machines I use most, but have switched my lesser-used machines to 8+, in case I need to look at sites that require the newer version. I haven't had to resort to it yet, though, on the sites I normally use.

#25 ::: mjfgates ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 08:28 AM:

Reading the threads here makes the world look odd quite frequently. How do I tell the difference between oddness in the HTML, and oddness in the world?

#26 ::: Rikibeth ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 09:21 AM:

Oh, look! More Sidelight/Particle-type link collections! I don't know whether to be pleased (link curation is awesome, and the folks here have interesting tastes) or dismayed (MORE stuff to absorb my time)!

#27 ::: pedantic peasant ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 09:24 AM:

Teresa @ 15:

The most important thing she learned is that a good moderator is someone who keeps bad behavior from happening in the first place.

As a teacher, this is the same rule that governs good classroom behavior. The best -- correction: only -- way to keep a healthy classroom is to be consistent in never letting the rules slide.

It's amazing how long it can take to truly understand (believe?) this, and how hard it is to maintain day to day.

My hat is off to all of you.

#28 ::: Doug ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 09:26 AM:

As long as the improvements put the neutrinos back in their place, it's all good.

#29 ::: Kip W ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 10:47 AM:

Am I improved yet?

May I suggest shorter Open Threads? It's just that they start taking a long time to load comments.

#30 ::: Paul A. ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 10:48 AM:

John Mark Ockerbloom @ #24:

I wish I'd known this last week, before I buckled and updated all my computers from 3.6.* on the assumption that being 5 major release numbers behind meant they were hideously out of date. (I did wonder why the update option skipped straight from 3 to 8.)

I want you to know that I've decided this is all your fault. Of course you didn't know I needed this information last week, because you're not psychic - which clearly means you're not trying hard enough.

#31 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 11:23 AM:

Kip W #29: Well, they started cutting threads off when they approached 1000, because then the back end starts choking! (Come to think of it, this year's Dysfunctional Families thread has already reached the 900s.)

#32 ::: SamChevre ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 11:56 AM:

Yeah for more random cool stuff from our posters!

And now for a randomish request/whine.

For my navigation style, having the recent comments where I don't have to scroll down to see it makes navigation marginally easier.

#33 ::: SamChevre ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 11:56 AM:

Yeah for more random cool stuff from our posters!

And now for a randomish request/whine.

For my navigation style, having the recent comments where I don't have to scroll down to see it makes navigation marginally easier.

#34 ::: SamChevre ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 11:57 AM:

The duplication above is accidental, not insistent.

#35 ::: John Mark Ockerbloom ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 12:09 PM:

Paul A: I, on the other hand, contend that it's all *your* fault for not psychically realizing that you needed to prompt *me* to psychically track your needs. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Folks who do want to "downgrade" to 3.6.* again can download the latest releases of that line here. (I don't know offhand if it will just neatly replace the later version you have, or if you need to uninstall the later version first.)

#36 ::: Kevin Marks ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 01:21 PM:

The point of the Chrome/FireFox 8+ approach to upgrading is that it is assumed to be continuous and backwards compatible, not yearly and fragile.
In other words, they have moved from a packaged software worldview, to a website worldview (does google.com have version numbers? does etsy.com ?).

The reason this is doable now is that the bundle of technologies colloquially known as HTML5 are designed to converge rather than diverge over time, and are specified to behave consistently between different browsers, even when your HTML is 'wrong'

#37 ::: abi ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 01:35 PM:

Xopher @1:
Unless it's Internet Explorer.

Never use a browser whose name is a cry of pain. ("Aieeeee!")

Tom @4:
The dragons are overdone.

You really don't want to read Jim's draft post about the digestive consequences of eating undercooked draconids.

#38 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 01:52 PM:

abi@37 -- but as a biologist-by-training, I'm fascinated by internal parasites! (and thanks for noticing...)

#39 ::: Jeremy Leader ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 02:14 PM:

Regarding the mixer picture, if you copy the URL (by right-clicking on the link, or copying this: http://www.angelfire.com/home/flexibleshaft/Model7Kitchen.JPG) and paste it in the url bar of a new browser tab or window, you will probably get around AngelFire's restrictions.

I suspect AngelFire is trying to prevent people following links from other sites to images on AngelFire's site, by checking the "Referer" [sic] header your browser sends along with the request. The "referer" header indicates the page where you clicked the link.

This public service announcement was brought to you by my nerdly nature. The mis-spelling of "Referer" was brought to you by the numbers 1945 and 2616 (in fact, I think it's now officially known as "Referer [sic]").

#40 ::: joel hanes ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 02:26 PM:

Your browser is not to blame.

We are controlling transmission
We will control the horizontal
We will control the vertical.

#41 ::: Kevin Reid ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 02:27 PM:

It's not so much a matter of following links, as downloading images embedded in someone else's page (usually without credit to whoever's work it is or who's paying for the bandwidth). The server hosting the image can't tell the difference.

(And yes, the embedding is a sort of link.)

#42 ::: Janet Brennan Croft ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 02:33 PM:

Echoing Sam Chevre's accidentally insistent whine -- with all the (wonderful) added linkie blocks, yes, you have to scroll down a lot to see the latest comments. Maybe fewer latest comments, but at the top of the left bar? Or fewer link from each mod?

#43 ::: Steve with a book ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 02:50 PM:

Jim's chess link in the sidebar is a nice ego-booster if you're rubbish at chess. I managed to get into a clearly won position which I then managed to blunder away and lose from! By my standards this is a win (I'll just pretend the website resigned round about move 30).

Hope ML keeps the colour scheme. I rather like the Aston Villa / West Ham claret-and-blue.

#44 ::: Nancy Lebovitz ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 02:55 PM:

One more possibility for the comment box-- if your comment has been gnomed, comment about it asap.

#45 ::: Constance ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 03:06 PM:

Avram's Sidebar concerning Copley's portrait of Paul Revere.


In much greater detail and even more interesting is the appendix in David Hackett-Fischer's Paul Revere’s Ride(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), xv, 3-4, and 292-293 that discusses this very portrait.

The entire book is brilliant, and will tell you more about the origins of the drive for Independence in such few words than just about any other book. You may think you know, but generally we don't, since we are taught a whole other complex. Of course it focuses entirely on Boston. There was a whole other complex of forces going on in the South, Virginia specifically, which isn't part of Hackett Fischer's book here.

Love, C.

Love, C.

#46 ::: DaveKuzminski ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 03:29 PM:

Re #19, anyone else see the shadow of the Google car?

#47 ::: Kip W ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 03:54 PM:

joel hanes @40: Puts me in mind of a great passage in some 70s fanfic where the protagonists are in a cell where there's a TV on a table. The TV comes on by itself and starts in on the "The Outer Limits" intro, concluding with "We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. We can even push your TV set off the table!" CRASH.

It's the only part of the thing I remember.

#48 ::: Singing Wren ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 06:08 PM:

While I really like the new sidebar links (now featuring all our moderators!), I feel compelled to note that on the Archive page for Avram's Phosphenes, the link for "Create Entry" is visible to the average site visitor. Now, as following this link requires the visitor to log in before doing anything, it probably doesn't need to be fixed immediately. But the link probably ought to be hidden eventually.

#49 ::: Phill Hallam-Baker ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 10:32 PM:

Dammit I'm an engineer not a lexicographer.

I don't know why 'Referer' causes people to get so upset. At this point my spelling is the correct one and the rest of you have it wrong.

Consider the number of HTTP transactions per minute, whose spelling do they use? Right, mine. Now consider the number of people using the legacy spelling in a year.

Which is bigger?

Since my spelling is now the most frequently used, it is clearly the correct one for the concept HTTP Referer.

#50 ::: Cally Soukup ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2011, 11:52 PM:

DaveKuzminski @ 46

I only see the shadow of the Google camera car if I "look down" a couple of times, and then "look left" once.

#51 ::: C. Wingate ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 06:01 AM:

I'm afraid I must ask to be added to the list of those who would like the "recent comments" put somewhere that avoids having to scroll so far to find them. Perhaps on the right side?

#52 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 07:41 AM:

Another suggestion for the HTML section of the comment-box, since this is a fairly common usage, but how to do it in HTML is not well-known:

<i>&lt;emote></i> = <emote>

Of course, getting that to work was interesting, and required the &amp; entity as well. And this is why I was so annoyed at the iPad keyboard. ;-)

#53 ::: guthrie ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 09:10 AM:

Interesting possible historical factoid regarding parhelia -
A parhelia is apparently also called a sun dog - it is when three suns are visible in the sky, caused by refraction of light by ice crystals refracting the sunlight horizontally, so you get three suns in a line. Usually seen near the horizon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

Back in 3rd February 1461, in the middle of the wars of the roses, a battle took place at Mortimers cross. On the morning of the battle a parhelion was observed in the sky, and according to the Secreta secretorum owned by Edward the 4th, a parhelion portended great political change, which means that when he saw it he would surely have realised that he would win. It is recorded that he made a great speech to his men saying that god was on their side, and of course they won, thus probably investing the start of his reign with an impressive aura.

(The parhelia, mention of it in the secreta secretorum and the inspiring speech all from Jonathan Hughes book "Arthurian myths and alchemy", although every time he mentions the battle he tends to not mention the explicit link between the astrology of the period and what Edward would have thought, despite that to me being such a brilliant example of how many people thought at the time)

#54 ::: Mark D. ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 10:20 AM:

Many thanks to Mr. Ockerbloom and others, and I will gladly wait for FF 9.

#55 ::: Lori Coulson ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 12:29 PM:

guthrie @53:

This phenomena is why Edward IV chose the "sun in splendor" as his personal heraldic device. It's also why Shakespear has Richard say:

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York...

#56 ::: Xopher HalfTongue ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 12:38 PM:

David 52: Shouldn't that be

<i>&lt;emote&gt;</i> = <emote>
?

#57 ::: Jacque ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 01:59 PM:

DaveKuzminski @46: Re #19, anyone else see the shadow of the Google car?

Usta be that, about halfway up the hill on 19th Street in Boulder, you could look down and see the hood of the Google car. They finally Photoshopped that out, party poopers.

#58 ::: David Goldfarb ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 03:37 PM:

Xopher@56: Depends on how strongly you feel about symmetry. The version David Harmon posted will work.

#59 ::: Melissa Singer ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 03:53 PM:

I'm also in the "recent comments currently require too much scrolling" camp, especially on a laptop with a not-huge screen.

Sorry to complain, since this is a place that hosts us so well and since this summer I was part of a big site upgrade on the place that I moderate . . . where we were inundated with complaints because we did a complete shift from email lists/groups to forums, and boy, were some people pissed! And people complain about all kinds of little, jerky stuff (why won't the "keep me logged in" button work?).

So yeah, I know it's a little thing. An annoying little thing . . . lol

#60 ::: Xopher HalfTongue ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 04:06 PM:

David 58: I insist on it.ti no tsisni I :85 divaD

#61 ::: David Goldfarb ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 04:18 PM:

I'm obscurely reminded of how Katie and I went to the gem and mineral gallery at the Smithsonian, where we saw specimens of the variety of tourmaline called "elbaite". I was moved to say, "Eti able was I ere I saw elbaite." Katie was unimpressed.

#62 ::: joann ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 05:12 PM:

Melissa #59 and others about scrolling to find comments:

I've had a hack for many a year: I keep *two* bookmarks for ML. One is to the main page; the other, the one I use all the time, is to the 1000 most recent comments page. That and copious use of the back button keep me operational.

#63 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 06:25 PM:

Xopher HalfTongue #56: The only issue here is that most HTML parsers assume any < is meant to start a tag, regardless of other context. Accordingly, "escaping" the open bracket is sufficient. I believe there are some comment-text parsers smart enough to auto-escape lone open-brackets, but ours isn't one of them.

David Goldfarb #58, Xopher #60: <snickerekcins>

#64 ::: joann ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 06:34 PM:

editing joann #62:

I should add that I keep that always open in a tab.

#65 ::: guthrie ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 07:15 PM:

Lori coulson #55 - is there anything Shakespeare didn't know about and cunningly tie into his works? I am in awe of the relevance and cunning in it.

#66 ::: Kip W ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 07:15 PM:

xopher, are you framing fearful symmetry again?

#67 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 09:18 PM:

PS to me #63: And dealing with HTML-like "emote" tags would imply auto-escaping any tag that's not recognized, which is a Non-Trivial Design Decision.

#68 ::: Janet Brennan Croft ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2011, 09:49 PM:

I ENJOY the Sparkly Bits, don't get me wrong, but following those links is *dessert* after I catch up on the latest comments and see what everyone is talking about. I'll get to them, but catching up with the community comes first for me.

#69 ::: DBratman ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2011, 06:18 AM:

Somewhere in the rebuilding process, the feed which sends posts to subscribers' LJ aggregation pages seems to have been broken. In your copious free time ...

#70 ::: dcb ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2011, 09:58 AM:

I can't find the long list of other people's sites to visit. Where's it gone? Hope it's not been axed.

#71 ::: Mary Aileen ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2011, 04:20 PM:

dcb (70): The blogroll is no longer on the front page ( ::sniff:: ). There's a link on the right sidebar, the blogroll itself is here.

#72 ::: dcb ::: (view all by) ::: December 11, 2011, 03:40 PM:

Mary Aileen @71: Thank you! I had no idea it was called a blogroll, so I'd never have found it. Now I know, I can use the link on the front page (there are blogs which I visit infrequently and have never bothered to bookmark because it was so easy for me to reach them via ML).

#73 ::: Cally Soukup ::: (view all by) ::: December 11, 2011, 05:30 PM:

While we're talking about changing stuff, I'd just like to mention that I prefer the way the links look in the Particles archive to they way they look in the Sidelights archive. In the Particles archive, the links change color dramatically (at least to my eyes) after they've been followed; in the Sidelights archive the color change is much more subtle (to my eyes) and I have to peer closely to make sure I'm not going back to an already-visited link.

I don't know what the new sidebar archives are like, as they've not been around long enough for me to have to use them yet....

#74 ::: David Goldfarb ::: (view all by) ::: December 11, 2011, 08:54 PM:

The new sidebars all seem to have a style which doesn't differentiate followed links from unfollowed ones. I wouldn't have noticed, since I almost never go into the archives per se; I follow the link from the front page or not at all -- and there, it follows the same color scheme as the "last n post" pages, with unfollowed links in royal blue and followed ones in aqua.

#75 ::: Gray Woodland ::: (view all by) ::: December 12, 2011, 12:38 AM:

Another salute to the blogroll, here. I've found many excellent sites by it that I wouldn't have otherwise. I wish the practice wasn't falling by the wayside generally, though for big blogrolls like this one I can see that the curating issues alone could become a thumping nuisance.

#76 ::: cajunfj40 ::: (view all by) ::: December 13, 2011, 06:10 PM:

I like the new additions below Particles and Sidelights, very nice. Also the rewording of the comment box. Makes a point, it does. :-)

Ooh, I just found the resizable comment box... Neat! Not sure if it is available on my iPod yet.

Overall, I've not noticed anything odd about the changes, except when viewed on an iPod Touch 8G, one or two generations old.

The first is that the current Open Thread 167 has shrunk to about half the screen width, and I have to zoom in to get it to full width on the screen. This is different from all other threads to date. Possible minor formatting difference on that thread? Not a big problem, but it certainly jumps out as "hey, this is different, and I can't tell if it is an error or not."

The other is a persistent issue that is likely an Apple iOS thing - I can't read the "mouseover text" on the Sidelights, Particles, etc. when viewing ML on my iPod. Is fixing that "easy", and if so, planned? I still have not bought an iPad, and this is actually irritating enough on the part of iOS that I'm heavily considering an Android tablet instead, just to be able to read that text. (I found a mobile app for XKCD, so that's sorted.)

While I'm asking for a variation in the flavor of the free ice cream (heh), any plans for a "light" version of the "Past 1000 comments" page, that automatically links to the "light" version of any given thread, similar to the "Making Lighter" linked from the front page?

Otherwise, I'm a daily reader here, and the content is such that I'll be reading no matter what device I end up with. (Of course, saying that undercuts my desire to have the mouseover thing fixed, and the "light" version added, but hey, it's true...)

#77 ::: Bruce E. Durocher II ::: (view all by) ::: December 25, 2011, 01:25 AM:

A really dumb question: did the search box go away from the front page, or is Google Chrome being stupid again?

#78 ::: Paul A. ::: (view all by) ::: December 25, 2011, 10:12 AM:

Bruce @ #77:

I'm not seeing a search box, in Firefox nor in Internet Explorer.

#79 ::: David Harmon ::: (view all by) ::: December 25, 2011, 11:32 AM:

Paul A. #78: Neither am I, on Firefox

Welcome to Making Light's comment section. The moderators are Avram Grumer, Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Abi Sutherland. Abi is the moderator most frequently onsite. She's also the kindest. Teresa is the theoretician. Are you feeling lucky?

Comments containing more than seven URLs will be held for approval. If you want to comment on a thread that's been closed, please post to the most recent "Open Thread" discussion.

You can subscribe (via RSS) to this particular comment thread. (If this option is baffling, here's a quick introduction.)

Post a comment.
(Real e-mail addresses and URLs only, please.)

HTML Tags:
<strong>Strong</strong> = Strong
<em>Emphasized</em> = Emphasized
<a href="http://www.url.com">Linked text</a> = Linked text

Spelling reference:
Tolkien. Minuscule. Gandhi. Millennium. Delany. Embarrassment. Publishers Weekly. Occurrence. Asimov. Weird. Connoisseur. Accommodate. Hierarchy. Deity. Etiquette. Pharaoh. Teresa. Its. Macdonald. Nielsen Hayden. It's. Fluorosphere. Barack. More here.















(You must preview before posting.)

Dire legal notice
Making Light copyright 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 by Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden. All rights reserved.