Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Bingorage 2.5

Halloooooo Bingoragers;

I was up all night working on a couple things; but, mostly, I went in and tweaked the guts of the page - a bit - to try and make it easier to read and navigate.
If you are a return reader, do me the favour of letting me know if the page is easier to read and/or comprehend (outside of my grammar, syntax, jokes, etc.). Please check out the comments for this post.

There are a couple of things that I would like feedback on:
- Some embedded flash players (video and audio) start up on page load, which is annoying, out of context, if you do not know where it is coming from. I have a selective "Flashblock" extension on my Firefox browser, so I did not notice until I tested the site in IE(6). This was a pet peeve of mine when visiting "myspace.com" sites, until I got Flashblock, so I understand. I'll try and remedy this through the content-hosters or an HTML code-tweak.

-I like a larger font; it's better for my eyes and shows up better against an image-based background (versus 'solid' colour). Is it legible? More or less so, now?

-Load times. I put quite a bit of pics, flash, javascripts and more video clips (lately) into my page; but I'm running a high-speed cable connection and the page loads pretty fast, for me. Anybody having real troubles with page loads?

-Does anybody use those social bookmark thingies at the end of individual postings? Are mine working? Too cluttered? Add more?...

-Is there anything on the page that doesn't work for you? Dead links? etc...


Update - December 12,2006:
Dumped some more javascript, non-posting 'flash', link buttons and cut the index page from 6 to 5 postings.

Update December22/06: Changed back to 6 postings.
Update - December 13, 2006:
Okay. Figured out how to turn off the autoplay feature on flash video-player. Thanks to the guys at HuntShow.com

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Google is integrating blogger (and the blogspot domains, presumably) into the Googlepire. Already, I have had difficulty leaving comments, using my blogger login on new "Blogger beta" blogsites.

When the tide turns and I am rolled into the Googlepire, I'll try and keep things functioning. They may have it all figured out by then, so quit worrying about it already, Eric.

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Click pic to visit the 'Myspace' page
for the "Northend Artists Collective" of Winnipeg.

frame from Patterson sasquatch film. bingorage

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greetings... so far, I'm not getting the error message that I was getting last month, but the page does still take a long time to load... everything show up, the but the browser still seems to "think" for a while about "something."

Regardless, I'm happy now that the browser isn't closing on me.

The large font is fine, and I can always shrink it if I need to with my mouse. I appreciate you addressing the flash issues.

I'm not much into the social-bookmark-thingy-cults, but I understand lots of folks like them. I don't feel that things look too cluttered, but there is a LOT hanging at the bottom of the Bingorage frontpage. What I like about that though is that it's all down there if I want it, keeping the sidebar clean and easy to navigate. I really like that you're including links to your galleries in the sidebar.

I'll let you know if I find dead links when I walk around the 'Rage. Don't fret about the Blogger Beta upgrades... you'll come through alright, although you'll need to be prepared to reapply all the customizations you've created for your template. (I found it was a great excuse to try new things with my blog, even though my coding skills are limited).

The whole comments/login thing sucks - I get around it by selecting "Other" and just typing in my name and weblink.

What I like about Blogger Beta are some of the improvements to publishing, template modification modules, and the introduction of "labels" (which is super handy for Arboreality, and improves searchabiliy of my site). Of course, anything in beta has issues... I've been poking my nose in here to keep abreast of the mess:

The Real Blogger Status
http://bloggerstatusforrealbeta.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

Damn... I take it back... I just got the same error message, "Operation Aborted.... MSIE must close the window...etc etc"

hmmm....

Anonymous said...

Say, did I miss the link for buying Bingorage gear... like the "Obey the Bass" tshirt? Let me know if I did, and if not, you might like to throw in a link/button for that in the sidebar.

Sorry if I missed it... there's a lot to see! ;)

Hoka-shay-honaqut said...

Hey, Thanks, JLB.

I reaally don't know what to say about the IE loading issue: I am pretty sure that my older versions of IE used to 'partially' open a webpage. Now, it crashes and wipes out the portion already loaded. Any other readers have this problem at other blogspot sites / this site?

I have already cut back on some of the 'extraneous' junk and will probably cut it some more; maybe reduce the number of postings per page.

I have a cafepress.com account and will link it in the sidebar, since I haven't really set myself up for direct sales on the site.

Thanks.
:Eric