Display of news items on main page: Order?

buzz · Jul 7, 2008

Just curious: What determines the order/layout of the news items on the main page? Other than important new news going in one of the top two feature spots, articles seem to appear in different spots each day I visit. They don't seem to be sorted by date. Just seems weird.

My vote would be to someday format the news articles blog-style, in descending date order (with an RSS feed!) in a single column. If ti has to be two-column, col 1 flowing into col 2 in reverse-date order would still be nice.

Anyway, not a demand, just some feedback. I'm lovin' the improved performance of the site!

ki11erDM · Jul 7, 2008

Yea… at first I found the front page nice… but I am absolutely hating it now.

Is there any way to display it differently? A simple list of the article without all those damn frames and scroll bars… I just can’t believe you would have 12+ scroll bars displayed on the front page… really boggles my mind.

WhatGravitas · Jul 7, 2008

ki11erDM said:
Is there any way to display it differently? A simple list of the article without all those damn frames and scroll bars… I just can’t believe you would have 12+ scroll bars displayed on the front page… really boggles my mind.

It's due to the Internet Exploder. There's a way to do that, but Morris said that would break compatibility with the Internet Exploder (all versions).

Cheers, LT.

ki11erDM · Jul 7, 2008

Lord Tirian said:
It's due to the Internet Exploder.

LOL
I have a VM of XP for each browser: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2.X, FF3. And the front page of Enworld displays almost identically on all of them, badly. What magic browser you want me to use? hehe
It actually looks like a resolution/font issue for FF3 and IE8 (all the VMs run 1024), if I ctrl- a few times they look ok but small as heck. Older IEs and FF2 look like crude no matter what I do.
So basically what you are saying is most people who view the page just get to view it incorrectly? Nice.

buzz · Jul 7, 2008

(Pops open Parallels, checks ENWorld in IE6/Win and FF2/FF3/Win.)

This is when I'm happy to use Macs both at home and work.

Safari renders the front page just peachy. FF3 (both Win and Mac) only puts vertical scrollbars on a couple of articles (the Wiki one, basically).

Adding

Code:

overflow-y:hidden; padding-bottom:30px;

to .feature fixes the issue in FF. (Gotta love the Web Developer toolbar.)

I dunno if that would fix it in IE, but maybe, as I got the idea from this article on fixing overflow bugs in IE.

Still, a better fix for me would simply be going back to a blog-style layout. Let each item take up as much space as it needs to, and avoid the whole overflow issue.

starwed · Jul 7, 2008

I fixed the scrollbars (to my satisfaction, anyway!) in FF3 by adding the following rules to userConent.css:

Code:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain(www.enworld.org)
{
    .feature, .article {    height: auto ! important;  }
}

This simply makes the article/feature blocks as large as necessary to contain the text. Alternatively, you could use overflow:hidden to hide any text that won't fit.

Still, a better fix for me would simply be going back to a blog-style layout. Let each item take up as much space as it needs to, and avoid the whole overflow issue.

I'd have to say the old way was easier for me to read... especially to quickly pick out what was new.

ki11erDM · Jul 8, 2008

starwed said:
I'd have to say the old way was easier for me to read... especially to quickly pick out what was new.

/agree

And a end user should not have to add code to get a page to display 'correctly'. I feel really bad saying this as i LOVE Enworld but i just dont see how in the world you can put all that time and effort into developing a site and not care how it looks in a dominate browser, be that FF3 or IEX.

amysrevenge · Jul 8, 2008

I just find it weird that the articles aren't sorted by date...

Michael Morris · Jul 8, 2008

amysrevenge said:
I just find it weird that the articles aren't sorted by date...

I have an idea...

Ok, got it. What's going on is the articles out of sequence have bad date inputs on their publish up and publish end setups. There's actually 6 entry points for this - Leader start/end, Feature start/end, Normal start/end. There really only needs to be one start date entry, then a point where it demotes from leader to feature, and feature to normal. I managed to confuse myself on this.

What was confusing everyone is the placement of the article order is determined by the date given for the group it's in. If I scheduled an article to show as leader from the 26th to the 30th, Then as a feature from the 1st to the 7th it will sort among the features as if it where first posted on the 1st even though the date shown is the 26th. The problem is worse among the normal articles.

The problem can be corrected for the interim by the newshounds, including myself, getting used to how the computer parses the dates for start and finish of articles. Long term though I need to correct the submissions interface which is far buggier than the display interface.

Michael Morris · Jul 9, 2008

I significantly changed the css - those using overrides might want to drop them. The declarations now are:

Code:

.leaderboard {
    min-height: 230px;
}
.leaderboard h1{
    font-size: 16px;
}

.leaderboard .subtitle {
    font-size: 14px;
}

.feature {
    min-height: 246px;
}

.article {
    min-height: 100px;
}