Monday, January 17, 2011

Site Upgrade

If you visited us over the weekend you may have noticed some changes taking place. I've updated the site's entire code to meet the latest web standards. The old code was written over five years ago and included various hacks we added in over the years. It was a mess and time for an upgrade.

The look remains pretty much the same, but now the width of pages is the same no matter how large your monitor, and the site is compatible with all the recent web browsers (supposedly including mobile, I don't have mobile so don't know).

Each post now has buttons to click to post to Facebook or to tweet. I also added recent article site feeds from other great Rays sites including DRaysBay, RaysIndex, The Process Report, and Dock of the Rays at the very bottom of each page. I may add a couple more if these don't slow down page load times too much.

The only known issue is the appearance of the sidebar for readers using the Google Chrome browser. The fix is simple, but would create even bigger problems, so I'm leaving it as is for now. If anyone has any problems or ideas for improvement, let me know.

8 comments:

  1. Looks awesome, Doug! It's a great design.

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  2. loved it before, love it now...

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  3. Thanks guys, glad you like. It seems a little plain/white, but I'll try pretty it up over time. I'm just happy I didn't crash the site!

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  4. One more thing, I mentioned adding additional feeds. I need an even number with the current layout look, and I have 3 in mind:

    Chris' Watching Durham Bulls Baseball
    Stacy Long's Blog on the Biscuits
    And Jim's new Clay Digest site on the Stone Crabs.

    Any ideas for a fourth? Ideally a Hot Rods blog? Any Rays sites I'm missing (the 4 already done are what I read)?

    I could add BA or Sickels, but since both have been so nice to us I hate to pick one over the other. And they really wouldn't notice the additional traffic from us anyway.

    I'd like to help a Rays blogger, let me know if I'm forgetting someone.

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  5. This guy is new, but his stuff is normally pretty good. He's the Rays blog for Neyer's ESPN Sweet Spot Network: http://therayarea.com/

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  6. Interesting, thanks Steve. I had read that a while back and it wasn't nearly as good, must have made some changes. I'll make him the top contender for the final feed slot until I hear of something better. Keep the ideas coming...

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