Tweaks - Search/Showcase

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Socoder -> Site & Server -> Tweaks - Search/Showcase
Fri, 27 Jan 2023, 13:47
Jayenkai	Tweaks - Search/Showcase This morning, Pakz picked up on the fact that TRG's latest Showcase was exposing the full-sized URL's, which (without proper wrapping) would stretch the boxes on the front-page a little too much, and caused the whole site to drop down below the sidebar, at his specific screen resolution. This is an issue I've usually attempted to fix manually, but it's happening with damn near every Showcase, lately. Instead, then, I've re-written a chunk of the "Search" functionality, so links become the Jay-Typical "(Linkage)" thing. As I was doing that, it occurred to me that that is very much a "Me, me, me" thing, and that (Link) would probably be "better", but I felt that was the vibe here.. .. But that's only the vibe because that's what I'd do. Would you do? What would you do? Is (Linkage) ok, or should I strip it back to (Link)? Or should I use a different work? (Goto Here) perhaps? shrugs Let me know. I've also got it to scan through the showcase, and if it doesn't already have a linked Image/Thumbnail in the showcase data, try to pluck out an image URL from the main body of text. This now shows a couple more images on the front-page, so I think that's probably a good thing, right!?! With the front-page's Showcase Search working well, I then headed into the general Search, and got the image-plucker to work on there, too, as well as similarly tidying up the URLs. (I did copy+pasted!) The next phase is those little My Threads and More links at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. For some reason they're not behaving the way I expected them to, so I must've hard-coded that functionality somewhere else in the scrambled mass of code.. I'll try again, tomorrow.. Another thing I looked into is why Brice's links never seem to show up. He tends to wrap things in [b] and [u] BBCode which .. I presume this is a theme-based opinion, but on my theme of choice, it completely hides the fact that the things are links. I can't imagine how many links I've missed because of that. I discovered a fair number, this morning. You can see a ton of examples here I need to fix that. It's not a specific Brice issue, it's more of a "Links should always stand out as links" issue, and I'm not happy about them hiding away like that. Grrr.. damn you css Speaking of CSS, Brice brought up the frequent "If you haven't posted much in your post and it's the first post on a page, the table scales incorrectly" bug. I've looked into that again, and screamed a fair amount. If you saw the forum bobbing and weaving at any time, today, that'll be the reason for it. The site still uses Tables, because I'm damned if I can fathom a way to do things "properly", and I think that's probably the way it'll be for a long time. I realised today that it's now nearly 6 years since the REWRITE of frontend of SoCoder, let alone how old the damn database is. ... God damn, I'm old.. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 27 Jan 2023, 14:39
Pakz	www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/designing-hyperlinks-tips-and-best-practices/ Looking at this page. There are a lot of examples of links and best practises. I personally have no preference. If it works on touch screen and can be identified that it is ok.
Fri, 27 Jan 2023, 15:48
therevillsgames	Opps - sorry I should have created proper hyperlinks Steam
Fri, 27 Jan 2023, 16:21
Jayenkai	Nah, not your fault. Even "proper" hyperlinks would've caused the same issue. It used to strip out all BBCode and the lengthy URLs screwed up the formatting. I've switched it to being the other way, now, so it's shrunken instead of expanded. Makes WAY much more sense! Derp.. -=-=- And now it looks sillier just saying Linkage over and over on the frontpage.. Dangit.. Put that back the way it was!!! -=-=- Honestly, if something that someone does looks wrong on the site, or the site doesn't seem to accurately portray what should be the result, then I think that's more a site issue than a user issue. Don't ever feel like you've done wrong. It's the site not being properly coded to do things properly that's the issue. That's kinda the same mentality that I took when writing GotoJSE. If the language doesn't "get" what you were trying to do, that's on the language, not on the user. I see now that a better form of (Linkage) might be to somehow extract the domain name of the URL, and put that into the brackets.. .. I wonder if I could wrangle that out of Regex, somehow. ... Dear god, help me!!! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 27 Jan 2023, 17:09
Jayenkai	OK, you can leave it be. I think I sorted it.. Maybe! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 27 Jan 2023, 22:25
Kuron	I bold and underline my links, mainly due to browser developers changing how browsers work. Browsers, by default, used to automatically underline links, so you know there was something to click on. They quit doing that long ago and I miss many links due to that when reading something, as I am not going to hover my mouse over every word in an article to see if there is a hyperlink. So, I try and underline them so people will know it is something clickable and I also bold it to bring more attention to it. The biggest complaint I hear from folks about modern web design is not knowing something is clickable, because it is not underlined like a hyperlink should be. So, I always try and remember to make them underlined. That is how the web is designed to work and navigate -- links.
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 01:36
Jayenkai	As much as I appreciate that, what's happening (for css, bafflement) reasons, is it's stripping the colour from the URLs. The colour, to me, is 100% more important. Take the above examples. There's colourful links up above, and then yours just looks like a heading, not a url. Obviously this must be a browser based issue, so I'm going to have to dig deep and figure out why it's happening. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 01:53
Kuron	I do not alter the color (not sure I can). Seems the url tag strips the color if it is bolded or underlined? Either tag seems to strip the color...
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 02:04
Jayenkai	Exactly. That's what needs fixing. Otherwise, most of your links just look like headings, and we can't have that. Consistency is the important thing, and the links losing their colour is a top priority that needs solved. FWIW, though I do approve of your "a link should be underlined, damnit" mantra, there are choices in different themes for a reason, and people deserve to have that choice. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 02:58
Kuron	I will do my best to remember not to bold/underline links, but I have been doing it on forums and sites for at least a decade or more since the browsers changed and this is the only forum I can remember it messing up. So, if I forget, please be forgiving, but I will try my best to remember not to do it.
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 03:13
Jayenkai	Again, not about "how you use the site", and more about "how the site is interpreting how you use it." The discolouration is the biggest issue, here, and that's a CSS problem. I've narrowed down why it's happening in the CSS, I just need to figure out how to tell CSS "but not when it's a link". .. And hopefully without having to go through every css file, for every theme.. .. Which I think I might have to. Once I've figured out how to do it in the first place! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 03:50
Jayenkai	"Inherit" is the key word when telling CSS not to recolour the links. All should be OK, now. Let me know if anything's wonky with the links, though I think they should be ok. Test it here <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style> * {color:#FF0000;} a {color:#0000FF;} b,u,i {color:inherit;} </style> </head> <body> <a href="3">Test</a> <a href="3"><b>Test</b></a> <a href="3"><b><u>Test</u></b></a> <a href="3"><u>Test</u></a> </body> </html> --v Try it with and without the inherit line, and you'll see how the * impacts the a! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 28 Jan 2023, 13:23
Kuron	If you are testing do NOT go by the link you posted shots of, as I went back and modified that link and took the bold and underline tags off it, experimenting which one was the culprit. Thank You Jay. \|update\| -=-=- \|update\| Yeppers works as shown above... TY Grandmaster Jay!