We expect it will be a much quieter week in terms of blog information from us elves. One important question remains: making sure the blog is readable for hand-held users. If you read T19 via handheld (Blackberry, etc.) please read the following and chime in with your comments.
This elf has a busy week ahead for her “real” job, and doesn’t expect to fiddle too much with TitusOneNine design or features for a few days. We’ve still got a number of things on our ToDo list, but nothing to our knowledge that urgently affects blog design and readability or features for most readers using laptops or desktops.
We have, however, received several comments from handheld users that the current design is not working well for handheld access. Before we make any major changes, it would help us to ask some questions of those who read the blog via handheld device:
1) Please describe whatever difficulties you are currently having. What we are hearing at the moment is that there is too much text and that perhaps we should reduce the number of entries on the main page. (Currently set to 50 entries. On the old blog it was usually set at 20).
2) Does using the calendar to view a day’s entries solve your problem? Usually there will be no more than 20 entries per day on a given date, so using the calendar would be similar to the amount of text that used to appear per page on the old blog.
Try viewing all the entries for June 10 and let us know how that works.
http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/2007/06/10/
3) We’ve also heard that the sidebar may be a problem for handheld users, since it displays first and it is a lot of info to scroll through. The “Print-Friendly” format we’ve set up may help as it will display articles without the sidebar. Please try the links below and let us know if they work for you.
To view all the articles on the main page in print-friendly format WITHOUT comments: http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/print/
(Currently the print-friendly WITH comments format does not work for viewing more than one article at a time. We can try to work on that.)
NOTE: You can also view a single day’s entries in print-friendly format without the sidebar by inserting the word “print” in the daily archive link between “t19” and the given date. Example:
The normal daily archive view for June 11 uses this link: http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/2007/06/11/
The link for the Print Friendly view for June 11:
kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/print/2007/06/11/
(note: we’ve removed the intial http://www. in the link above so it would display the rest of the link properly with bolding of the word “print”)
Please try out these options and let us know if they make reading the blog via handheld easier. If there are still problems, we’ll be glad to try something different.
Note: We’ve now added a link in the “printer-friendly” view that makes it easy to get to the comments for each article so those reading all entries in print-friendly mode can leave a comment on articles of interest. Let us know if this works ok. Obviously the print-friendly view was originally designed for printing, not for commenting, and so it doesn’t have a lot of blog-navigation links.