On the redesign: The top of the page is less cluttered -- great. I'll get used to the new color scheme (right now I like the old one better). The typesize in the comment box is large enough that it fills up rather quickly... I'd prefer that the text I'm typing here is closer to the size it will appear in the final version. Other than that, good job!

I keep typing my own name in the "Subject" box, since Moveable Type doesn't fill it in automatically... but that's my fault. Maybe make the user name bigger?

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I changed the CSS to shrink down the font-size of the comment textarea. Should be a lot closer to the text of the comment itself.

As for changing the size of the username, well, that I think you'll have to get used to :)

Charlie

Yes, that's better in terms of size. It's still very...uh... bold. But the new colors are already feeling more comfortable.

Have you seen HTMLArea? It's not formally identified as open source, but the license seems pretty liberal.

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

yep. it works with drupal. i've installed it on the drupaled and drupalblog distributions. just has to be turned on in the modules section (you can try it out if you want). we have talked about installing it on kairosnews.

Yes, that's probably why I thought of HTMLArea... for what it's worth, I'd recommend it be activated here.

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I used to use htmlarea on my sites. It's a pretty good program, but does slow things down a bit. There's also some issues with copying/pasting from WORD.

well, don't use word :)

actually, the work around is probably to copy and paste from word into notepad, then from notepad into htmlarea. seems like i saw this suggestion in relation to drupal because of the character set conversion.

meanwhile, htmlarea does dramaticall slow down the site when it comes to posting content. i'm more than painfully aware of this right now hanging out in dialup land. good for broadband users; bad for dialup access. i've been hoping someone would install a switch so that users could select whether or not to use it in their site profiles. then it definitely would be the thing to have.

Well, I finally managed to fix HTMLAREA to accept word pastes (the notepad thing doesn't work easily at all) but it was a hassle. I had to go into the sourcecode and introduce a filter for most of the word junk. It was a slow and painful process that I hope never to endure again.

Leave it to Microsoft to introduce leave its crappy formatting codes lying around for the rest of the civilized word to clean up. Unfortunately, by the time you've stripped these codes, you've also stripped most of your formatting and have to start over.

well, i'm not into modifying the code in htmlarea. the problem is that drupal releases new version updates 3 or 4 times a year. so adding a module which might, too, require modification each time is more than i want to mess with.

so, should we implement htmlarea as is? obviously, i wouldn't use it. and i think most of the time, it's possible to do without it. what do you think?

You could throw up an htmlarea somewhere for people who want to use it. All you have to do is click to get the HTML code and paste it in to a standard text area. Easy.

lovely. skins are fun. good stuff, thanks for all the work for your readers.

welcome. i was on a skin making binge. so modifying one for kairosnews--rather than just making them available for download--was the most fun of all :)

(well, except for the new look on cyberdash.com ;)

I also thank you very very much.

That's a good idea, Matt. It's true that I wouldn't need htmlarea every time. Maybe just make it available via a popup for those who want it?

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

sorry. no configuration option for choosing to use htmlarea by a popup. it's either enabled, or not. however, when enabled, you can switch back and forth in and out of wysiwyg and source code mode.