By Cyrris , 30th July 8:48 pm
Aelon’s current design is now 7 months old. As far as my site designs go, that’s bang smack on the average life span of all the sites I’ve run. Usually by now, I’ve become well and truly tired and frustrated with certain aspects of my work. Usually by now, I have started tinkering with new design ideas I’ve had in my head for a few weeks. Usually, within a month, you’d be seeing a completely new site, with all sorts of improvements and changes to praise or bitch about.
This time round, however, things are different. I don’t really have many niggling issues with the design building up in the back of my head. Everything seems to work as it should, looking how it’s meant to look. Thing is, that’s just what I think - and that’s rather selfish. So, I’d like to know what you guys think. What you think of the layout, the colours, the functionailty, whatever. This goes for both the site and the forums - anything you can think of improving, I’d love to hear it. Your answers will determine whether I feel the need to redesign everything, or just make some tweaks here and there… or to do nothing at all.
Perfectly good looks and functionailty are no reason to hold off on a redesign, but are perhaps reason to postpone one. In any case, I’d love some input from more perspectives than just my own. Be picky. Really picky.
By Cyrris , 26th July 3:12 pm
That’s right folks, Aelon in it’s current blogging form was launched one year ago on this day. Before that, of course, we had a short 13 month stint at being a general gaming site with reviews and articles. I think our change of format to a blog based system was possibly the best move I ever made online - the site has since been a complete success. The time has passed pretty damn quickly, as it only feels like a short time ago that I was writing some of those articles I see are now 11 or 12 months old in the archive. Let’s go over what we’ve achieved to date…
» Read all of “We’re One“…
By Cyrris , 29th June 6:11 pm
As planned, our message boards have received a pretty substantial upgrade. As well as updating to the newest version of phpBB, they have had a face-lift to bring their design more in to line with Aelon itself, and to try and remove as much of the generic phpBB look as possible. A lot of the changes also removed a bunch of unnecessary buttons and other features which I found just added to clutter, so the look is much more streamlined.
All of the useless ICQ/WWW/Email buttons under each post have been removed - you can see them when you view someones profile anyway. And now, to view profiles, you just need to click on the persons username. Much more intuitive, in my opinion. As always, let me know if you experience any bugs, and I’ll squash them. For now though, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new look, and will be taking suggestions for improvements. I might add though, that if you don’t like bright sites, you should put some sunglasses on before proceeding.
By Cyrris , 20th June 4:50 pm
From an outsiders perspective, and even somewhat from my own, Aelon’s ability to protect itself against spam has, for a while now, been quite good. Over the past few months, barely a handful of spam comments have made it on to the site, and even they were detected and removed almost instantly. This has all been thanks to WordPress’ good protection, despite a few legitimate posts ending up in the moderation queue thanks to my draconion list of trigger words.
Further behind the scenes, however, it’s becoming a pain. Multiple spam comments are caught every day, and each needs to be manually checked by me to ensure it’s not a legitimate post. It only takes a few seconds each time, but this does get arduous. More concerning (to me at least) is that spammers have also effectively destroyed Aelon’s referrer logs, and have wasted a lot of our bandwidth which to me is unacceptable .
As such, I have as of today authorised the use of a WordPress plugin called Bad Behaviour. It has been demonstrated successfully elsewhere, and promises to neutralise both comment and referrer spam threats. However, with this new weapon (as virtually any) comes a small risk of friendly fire. If you ever find yourself blocked by this plugin, please let me know immediately. The fact is, every legitimate commenter here is standing directly in the firing range of this new weapon, and if anyone gets hit, I need to know so I can make sure it doesn’t happen again. If casualties become unacceptably high, I’ll be taking it down, but otherwise I would love to see if it delivers.
By Cyrris , 13th March 6:50 pm
OK, because I did all the hard work on my own offline version of the site over the past while, Aelon’s actual upgrade today took all of 5 minutes. I’ll spare you the technical details of what has changed, and will instead tell you about the things that you will notice as different.
Firstly, Gravatars have been enabled on the site. For those who give a damn, you can go to the gravatar website and upload your own gravatar, and it will show on any blog entry that uses the same e-mail which you signed up to gravatar.com with. As such, it can follow you to any blog or any forum on the entire internet, which has the system enabled. I’ve not actually seen any forums that use it yet, but a lot of blogs do. Like this one.
Secondly, WordPress now remembers who you’re logged in as in a more graceful fashion. Rather than just having the name/email/site inputs already filled, it just tells you that you’re logged in as… yourself. It saves space, and makes the system seem smarter than it was before, even though it really isn’t. Still, it’s nice.
Lastly, and most importantly, the upgrade means we can properly facilitate those who would like to casually blog with us. So, if you’d like to post entries up on the blog once in a while, the details on how to go about it are in this forum thread. It would be very cool to see a bunch of you up there. The requirements for doing so are pretty basic.
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