The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a few very minor changes to the layout around here. Why? Because after 8 years of complacency the back-end has finally been updated! broomlet is now a WordPress site like everyone else. This update required our tireless staff to laboriously recreate the old design even though it had just been a default template chosen without any great consideration back in 2005. For this among many other things she deserves thanks. Thanks!
What does this mean for you, readers both loyal and hypothetical? I don’t know; probably nothing much except a slightly wider reading area and the new, unnecessary archive navigation options at right. (The big long archive list is still secretly available here.)
If you come up against anything confusing or broken or newly ugly while navigating the site, trying to leave comments, or anything else, let me know.
Hopefully what this means for me is no more spam.
The site is also now mobile-optimized. Thanks, Broomlet!
Can you expand the list of recent comments so we can see more than the most recent five?
Sure, but then it starts to dominate the sidebar. The chances of you missing more than 5 comments worth of action around here seem pretty slim. How many do you want to see?
All of Maddie’s. Maybe it could be an expandable list.
Well, I’ll look into that. But I suspect this is the only moment when this frustration will apply, since from now on, as I say, you will be clued into all current comments by the sidebar and you are very unlikely to miss more than 5 comments at one go. Plus the phenomenon of Maddie commenting unexpectedly on a very old entry was pretty unique. I can assure you that she only commented on that one entry. You are not missing anything.
By the way, I was hoping I could teach it to auto-approve comments by IP address, but apparently it will only approve a commenter if they use a consistent name and email address. Also going to see if I can fix that. But for now, know that you can save yourself the wait for approval if you start using an email address. It won’t be visible, I don’t think, and in any case it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s consistent, so you can just pick something fake as your “password.” On the other hand I may just end up ditching moderation altogether if the new automatic spam filtering proves sufficient and go back to the instant gratification free for all of the old days.
Not sure I’m going to keep the nested replies.
I like the new look. Thanks to you and your staff.
I’m insulted that Adam doesn’t feel the need to be kept informed of all of MY comments.
MRB, it’s only because I know Maddie goes and comments on random old entries as she happens to watch them with my nephews. Like the other day when they all watched Sid and Nancy.
Also, Broomlet, there is no longer a “Preview” button, which is a helpful way to make sure I got all my HTML tags right.