Angry Robot

Shocktoberfest

The Feed

(There may well be a few housekeeping posts as a result of the redesign. This is certainly one of them.)

If you are following this site via its RSS feed, I have a public service announcement for you.

For a long time, blog owners have used a service called Feedburner to improve their management of RSS feeds. Feedburner lets you track your subscribers, see which links are clicked on, makes podcast feeds easy, etc. The service became successful, and thus was bought by Google for $100-million, and for a while, things were fine.

Until recently. Google announced that the Feedburner APIs were deprecated. This doesn’t mean that Feedburner feeds are going away, but it does make many of us concerned about Google’s enthusiasm for the product and how this may affect the rosiness of its future.

Just to be safe, if you think of it, you could switch your feed to the following new official, excellent, non-3rd-party-reliant URL: Angry Robot RSS Feed.

Behold, New Design

Months ago I set a goal: have a redesign of this site done before my new kid is born. I am just barely making it – kid is due in less than a week. Yeah I should be building a crib right now (kidding, there’s no way I could do that! It would have nails sticking out and shit!)

My pre-parental responsibilities are unshirked, sirs – worry not. Yet here we are, flashy new design. And what would a redesign be without a long, navel-gazing blog post? Funny you should ask!… NOTHING!, I SAY!

Goals

This is what I wanted to do:

• Go down to one column. Ram was right, and I think I knew it a few years ago when we discussed it. For almost all purposes, one column designs are the best. When I see side columns these days, I mostly see feeble excuses for serving some ads.
• “Responsive”! That’s the word for a design that will work on computers, tablets, and phones. Whaddaya know, one column designs really work well on phones. (Still was plenty hard to figure out though, with a bunch of new CSS / HTML tags that didn’t exist when last I dabbled in this nonsense.)
• Simplify everything, strip out whatever isn’t really necessary. For me that was: tags, categories, comments, “read more” links, and assorted other bits of cruft. Heck, I even took out the name of the site. But you can see that in the address bar. If that matters. Just call it the Site That Must Not Be Mentioned.
• Improve a lot of stuff on the back end. New version of Textpattern, ditched a bunch of old busted-up plugins, etc.
• Speed. Hopefully all these changes will help speed things up around here. The site will be moving to a faster server, too. I hear that helps.

Unfortunately, I’m a total hack at web stuff. I dip in every few years, discover the field has changed radically, try to patch something together, struggle for weeks with a lot of trial-and-error, heavy on the error. So as per usual I haven’t tested this in the major browsers THAT thoroughly. But I think most of these checkboxes got checked.

Known issues:

• RSS feed: in the link posts, clicking on the title goes to the Angry Robot archive page rather than the link destination. Yeah… it was like this before, too. Working on it. At least the occasional 404s should be fixed now.
• Search page – works but looks ugly.
• Site looks like ass on old versions of Internet Explorer. Probably not fixing this. Hopefully it looks okay in 10 though? Is that the latest one? Stifles yawn It should work great in chrome, safari, and firefox, at least.

If you see problems other than this stuff, can you let me know? It would be greatly appreciated.