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News and Comment July 2013

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2 July (Part 1) - Running repairs

Orpington High Street Orpington High Street BroadwayWhile I am preoccupied with other things may I show you how Orpington’s High Street has stood up to three years of pounding by bus wheels? Same contractor as Bexleyheath Broadway. The ramps have been dragged forwards and the repairs have left unsightly stains.

In Orpington the bus stops were block paved and they have all been ripped up and replaced by tarmac. In Broadway all bus stops are tarmac. Maybe the contractor learned from their mistakes, Bexley Broadway (picture 3) looked pretty solid to me.

Orpington pictures, thanks to a reader who has the spare time to get out of Bexley.

Everyone who isn’t a techno-nerd can go away now, but my request for feedback on the new site facilities has produced a mixed bag with only one common feature. Everyone who thinks it is a huge improvement has given their name and everyone who disagrees is anonymous and hasn’t given me any real clue as to what their problem might be. “It’s gone all wriggly” doesn’t help put me on the right path.

There are in fact only two dissenters (but three emails) and many more of the “it works fine” variety. Phew!

Yesterday’s complainer came back in response to me going to the trouble of replying publicly and said “OK, nothing more from me then. It'll be your loss”. I suppose it would be arrogant to shrug my shoulders and say “So what” but with the July blog accessed 2,690 times yesterday I am very tempted. With the ‘wriggly’ complainant demanding I restore the original site I will have to bore the rest of you to death by explaining why that won’t happen. I doubt he’ll be bothered to read it but here goes…

Basically the original site is still there untouched.

A modern website is entirely modular. The text and the way images look is all controlled by little modules which are dragged into service when required. So the banner picture, the Bonkers logo, the salaries carousel, menu and the size of text and images are all defined by separate modules. That is why the banner occasionally changes, just refer a page to a different module, job done.

The Blog has always been serviced by six modules which control the size of text and other related things. All that happened over the weekend was that a seventh module was added. That was simple, no new tricks to learn, but the seventh module defined a narrower screen width which had consequences for images wider than the reduced width. 'Standard size’ images were easily changed by redefining a module but non-standard image sizes are going to need a lot of manual adjustment - which has only been attempted back to the beginning of June.

Unless the user decides to switch into the new narrow screen module he will carry on using the old one and the new site is effectively the old site, because it is a combination of the basic text referring to the same old module.

I have had two ’web professionals’ tell me it is all working perfectly, but I do not discount the possibility that out there somewhere, someone has found a problem but just anonymously saying it is ‘wriggly’ is not going to fix it. Device name and browser please as a minimum.

Incidentally, one of those web professionals had missed the point that the idea is that the user messes around with those AAA symbols, or the Mobile equivalent, until he finds the one that suits best, then he goes to Configure (on the menu) and sets it for permanent future use.

In an attempt to locate the problem with the Opera browser and the menu, the main site menu may undergo temporary experimental changes. The blog will be unaffected.

How did I get into all this!?

 

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