Hotter Than Your Mother

By | September 10, 2017

I’m trying out a new, clean, look, like The Cube. Or Blanche’s Room of Judgement. Don’t panic, you still get the same great content.

It’s been seven years since I last changed the look of Bother’s Bar – it’s served very well, looked busy whilst not being too cluttered, invited discussion. This still has the same features, they’re just all on the right now.

I may make changes in due course – I may even change back. Anyway, let’s give it a week and see how you get on.

19 thoughts on “Hotter Than Your Mother

  1. Mika

    It’s DIFFERENT and…. actually, kinda nice. Looks clean, has same brand feel. Not sure about the right-hand nav, though.

    Is the comment display on Mobile fixed yet…? REPORTING BACK SOON.

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      I suspect long nested comments on mobile will continue to look not brilliant, although I noted that looking landscape rather than portrait helped a lot.

      Reply
      1. Mika

        Yeah, just checked, can confirm. In portrait , seven nested comments deep is hard-to-read. Eight is single-file still. Ah well. Rarely gets that deep except shoe discussion threads, so not really worth fixing, just more an amusement. XD

        Reply
        1. Brig Bother Post author

          Not really sure the best way to fix really. I can limit comment nesting to three or four layers but then it only really goes further during really good discussions. It might be something I might trial.

          Reply
          1. Brig Bother Post author

            Alright, I’ve set it to 5 instead of 8. Let’s see how everyone gets on. I hope not too much sense is lost in older threads.

          2. David B

            The nesting on Facebook is only 3, I think, so it seems like a good compromise.

    1. Brig Bother Post author

      I think that’s fair enough, it’s taken me a little while to get accustomed.

      It feels bloody great on my iPad though.

      Reply
  2. Brig Bother Post author

    This feels much slower to load I’m noticing. I’m not ruling out changing back, as it’s the sort of thing that may annoy me.

    I’m going to give it a few days though.

    It’s exactly like Phil and Kirstie’s Love It or List It.

    Reply
  3. Brig Bother Post author

    No, now you see I changed it back and got annoyed I couldn’t work out how to change the header into a clickable link, and the slowness probably wasn’t down the theme because the background stuff was a bit slow as well. And then I remembered why I changed to this in the first place.

    Basically this place might be a bit schitzophrenic over the next week so apologies in advance.

    I have asked the theme people if there’s a way of emboldening commenters names.

    Reply
  4. Brig Bother Post author

    Appropos of nothing, Broadcast suggesting 5 Gold Rings has been recommissioned, although I thought it was recommissioned ages ago.

    So there we are.

    Reply
  5. Des Elmes

    Same view as Thomas I’m afraid – I prefer the old look.

    And I have to admit, it feels kind of wrong that only the dates of the posts are displayed – not the times as well. (The time of this particular post is 5:20 pm.)

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      That’s interesting, I hadn’t noticed that until you pointed it out.

      I don’t think I’m changing back though. I got cold feet for a couple of hours and changed back, then about half an hour later whilst setting it all up again it felt like a massive step backwards and hurredly rechanged it. Now it’s been up a few days I really like it, and as previously suggested it looks great on my tablet (where the grey sidebars set off the whiteness of the page nicely).

      Crucially it’s a theme that’s still well supported (Eximius hadn’t been updated since 2011, with all the flaws that that suggests) and gets updated periodically so there are elements I may be able to make better in the coming period. I went through about 30 themes to try and find something that emulated Eximius to a decent degree and there were some that came fairly close but each had something that really niggled – the runner up had a similar three column layout, but for some reason it would only show extracts of posts and crucially had no way of showing how many comments a post had for whatever reason, which for a place which intends to invite discussion was a no-no. There are others that felt too boxy, or were set up with a font which felt slightly too large. Or I felt had too large an indent for its nested comments (although this is less of an issue now I’ve reduced the limit to five from eight)

      The Iconic One Theme basically won by accident, I wasn’t expecting a two column theme to work out very well, but it turned out it looked quite nice and ticked most of the boxes, other than a three-column layout (I can switch the sidebar to the left if I wanted but I think it would feel rubbish – content on the left or middle or not at all). It also means that BB 5.0 whenever that happens doesn’t have to be shoehorned into a certain look – previously 1.0 and 3.0 have been quite busy and 2.0 and 4.0 have felt quite clean. BB 5.0 will probably be styled to look like something from Geocities.

      Reply

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