Phil Gyford

Articles

Phil Gyford has written four articles:

Annotations and comments

Phil Gyford has posted 771 annotations/comments since 27 December 2002.

Comments

First Reading

About Monday 5 September 1664

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Thanks for the pointer re Mr Penn -- my mistake, now corrected. I've also added a page for gaily/gally to clear up the confusion in any future entries too.

About Sunday 14 August 1664

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Just a quick note to pre-empt any further digressions along these lines... we don't want to get into any 21st century politics unless it sheds light on Sam's world! Thanks.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

The thought has occurred to me, but personally I don't like advertising and do my best to have ads hidden on all sites I visit. But maybe I'll experiment sometime -- if only to see what kind of ads appear, as you suggest!

Sorry for the lack of further changes -- my time is extremely limited and just keeping the diary entries coming takes up what little free time I have available.

Although I did change how the tabs on the Encyclopedia pages work not long ago, which took a while. Hopefully no one has noticed the difference, but they are (I hope) more accessible (eg, work better in screen readers and old browsers) now.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Wilie, sorry about that - the problem with the tabs in Windows Internet Explorer should be fixed now.

Saraswati, LiveJournal seem to have started looking for the feed of diary entries in the wrong place. I've set things up so it should soon start working again for them all the same.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Printing pages of the site should work much better now. I haven't tested all sections of the site in all browsers, so let me know if you try printing something and it comes out particularly ugly or unreadable.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

I've now made links to pages that you've already visited a different, lighter colour. It's tricky to get the balance between them being noticeably lighter, but not so light they're hard to read.

You may have to visit and reload that global.css file linked to in my initial post, above, to see the changes.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

I mentioned in a previous thread that I haven't even looked at the issue of printing pages yet. I'll try and find time soon to make printed versions better than they are at the moment...

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

I'm going to remedy the link colour situation. It was an oversight on my part that I didn't do this. It's increasingly common for sites to only have a single link colour (which I think is a bad idea) and I guess I've got used to it. I'll try and find the time over the next few days to find suitable colours.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

"Guest": I didn't say that the new stylesheet did anything about the link colours. I'm thinking about that one.

The asterisk should be working OK -- it's working fine for me now at least. Your browser needs to accept cookies for it to work.

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

The Recent Activity link wasn't very obvious on the old site and one of the things I wanted to do with the new version was make it more obvious -- I'm glad it worked for you jdon!

About Friday 4 March 1663/64

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Thanks for your thoughts Don (and others), but it would be great if you could keep comments on the design to entries in the Site News section of the site, and keep the annotations relevant to the diary entries. Cheers.

About Site design updates

Phil Gyford  •  Link

As an aside... you may or may not have noticed that the asterisks next to each annotation/comment indicate whether that item appeared since you last visited the site (the asterisk is dark if so, pale if not). It's not immediately obvious, and it's far from 100% foolproof, but it's better than nothing.

Anyway, I've just noticed these haven't been working properly since the weekend, but I gave it a nudge and it should gradually begin to work from now on...

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Part of the reason I went with the fixed width (like most other websites that contain a lot of text) is that it's possible to set the width to something reasonable for reading.

It also makes certain aspects of doing the design easier, because one knows how much space there is -- for some elements it can get very difficult to make things work for any width. And the process was already difficult enough as it was!

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

William, I think you've just imagined the masthead font, or your browser is rendering it strangely. The masthead text is set in bold Georgia text, and it's up to the web browser and operating system as to how that looks (some look better than others).

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Thanks Paul, for pointing that out before I could. I realise it's not immediately obvious, but I hoped that (a) having it in the same position as the 'NEW' markers before would help people spot it and (b) a look at the Recent Activity page would give the game away. If it's a bit problem I can change the asterisks for something less attractive but more practical!

For anyone still having problems with tiny, tiny text then go to this URL and then click the Refresh/Reload button in your browser: http://www.pepysdiary.com/style/d… Then return to the site and all will be well.

For those who find the main column too narrow... in the previous design the main column width was a bit less than 64% of the total window width. In the new design the total width is fixed at 750 pixels (so it fits on an 800 pixel wide screen) and the main column's width is about 470 pixels, which is 63% of the total window width.

The logic behind fixing the total width, rather than have it expand to the full width of the window, is that it's generally thought that having 65-80 characters on a line is optimal for reading -- any longer and it's easier for the eye to get "lost" on the way back from the end of the line to the beginning of the next.

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Ira - sorry about the printing problem. Looking at the layout of the site for printing is on my to do list but I haven't reached it yet. I'll try and fix it as soon as I can.

About New design launched

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Thanks for the kind comments everyone.

I agree with you all about the relative width of the columns. One reason the right-hand column is so wide is that I have some ideas for new features and these will be placed there.

I had thought about making the right-hand column narrower, at least until I got round to adding new stuff that required the width, but I decided to stop fiddling with the site and just launch it!

But, although all that empty space seems "wasted", if it was made smaller there isn't any more information that could be put in the main column -- it would just mean making the main text a little bigger and giving it more space. Not a bad thing, but it means we're not losing anything at the moment.

And Jesse -- to be honest I kind of agree with you about having the Encyclopedia links next to every diary entry; it seems a bit unnecessary. This was added fairly soon after the site first launched to make it obvious to people where to look for more information before asking questions in the annotations. Some people have since said they still find it useful, so I'm happy to keep it there for now, at least until I come up with something more interesting or useful to replace it...