The days of PDA-247 are numbered… PDA-247 is a large site and currently holds more than 6,000 news articles, reviews and thoughts. The current setup simply isn’t working well and it’s time to move away from WordPress and a standard host- 247 is close to hitting traffic and memory limits in 3 separate areas.
I have decided to take the opportunity to change (for the final time!) the name of the site to something more generic and Lost In Mobile is the chosen one. It’s for those of you who are lost in the greatness of the modern mobile experience and for those of you who are lost for a moment and need some help. Lost In Mobile will cater for everyone.
I need your help though.
Please take a trip over to www.lostinmobile.com and try out as much of the site as you can. I want your views on how the comments system works, how easy you find it to navigate and if you think it is faster than PDA-247 (it should be 2 to 3 times faster).
Bear in mind that some work still needs to be done such as consistency on the fonts across the site, the logo and some other tweaks are still needed. I have tried to make the design as similar to PDA-247 as possible so it should feel familiar.
No articles will be posted on 247 over the weekend, they will be on L.I.M. to give you the chance to use it properly.
One observation: the name of commenters is quite small and hard to see – I’m not too sure who I’m disagreeing with or laughing at.
Fixed:)
Looks good and definitely seems faster.
A test comment.
Another test.
The name of the RSS feed is HOME?
My first impression was that the weight of the article type was too heavy. It looks like its all on bold (and with good reason, I just looked at the page code and it is all bold). With all the text in bold, you lose the ability to emphasise any words or phrases. The type size appears to be the same as PDA-247.
There doesn’t appear to be a commenter login, I guess that comes later. And some articles are tagged “Comments off”, so I guess that there are no comments allowed there. Makes QOTD hard to answer…
In the comments section, the lead-in copy “Reader Comments” followed by the comment count, and the comment post copy “Post a New Comment” are in “Times” typeface, I would have thought for consistancy, these would be in a sans-serif typeface.
So that would be my 2 cents worth ( or 2d for the UK inclined ).
Thanks for the feedback David- by the way, it’s 2p in the UK:)
Firstly, the comments for the latest articles have now been enabled- still getting used to the system. Sorry about that.
The ‘Times’ font is being looked at along with all of the other fonts and the weight of the text. You shouldn’t be seeing all of the text in bold. If you are, what device are you using?
As for logins, that should come a little later. Want to set up a proper member facility.
“The name of the RSS feed is HOME?”
Should be Lost In Mobile now- just tweaked it
I thought the old site was fine.
No speed problems.
I’m sure the LIM will be great too.
The new site should load in 25% of the time 247 does. That is what we are currently seeing.
Thanks for the correction Shaun. I guess I was too far back in the times. 2d was pence under the pre-decimal currency I believe, I’ll look it up later to confirm ( ie. Two Shillings and six pence was 2’6d ) and it has been quite a few decades since Australia used that currency system. But I digress.
I have just checked the site again, and all the bold is gone, and even the page code has changed. I am using Firefox 3.6.17 (Win 7 Pro OS) with PDA-247 in one tab and LIM in another tab, with a firebug extension to pull the web page code for the article elements. This morning (my time) there was bold code and this evening there is strong codes only for emphasis.
I would suspect that I must have been looking at an old server cached version of the page.
The site looks much better now than it did this morning.
Oh, and by the way, I had suspected that all the comments had not been moved over yet, I just thought I had to put some comment in the iPlayboy article to give it a try.
Also on the comments section, the “Reader’s Comments” and “Post New…”, I would only suggest to knock the size down from 27px to 25px (same as the article heading) or 24px ( a smidge smaller ) as they, to me, look a little overstated. The type style is good though.
(thumbs-up) It’s looking good now.
Oops! Shouldn’t have used HTML syntax for clarification. The code sample has been interpreted as formatting in my comment.
Silly me….
… that should stop this over-zealous formatting. This would be so much easier if I could have edited the previous comment/s.
“I would only suggest to knock the size down from 27px to 25px (same as the article heading) or 24px ( a smidge smaller )”
Agreed and done.
There may be a problem with some of the latest comments because the posts are duplicated on LIM. I can’t duplicate the articles or split the comments over both so some of the comments from yesterday may be lost. Losing approx 20 out of 13,000 is OK I guess:)