Station Upgrades

I’m making some upgrades and alterations to Stonekettle Station this weekend.

Yes, yes. Please, stop your wailing. It needs to be done.

Despite the fact that I haven’t been posting more than two times a week lately, readership continues to increase at a steady rate – and has ever since the America posts. I needed to make some changes to accommodate the traffic load. 

I keep thinking that I should probably switch Stonekettle Station from the Blogger platform to something a little more modern, say like Wordpress, but the thought of making the jump and the danger of data loss inherent in any process of such nature fills me with a huge amount of ennui.  Maybe later, but not today. I’ve already got enough stuff to do this weekend.  Plus, I just plain like Blogger.  I’m used to it and it’s comfortable and it works. And Google keeps making improvements to the Blogger platform. Some of which you’ll see here today and may have noticed already. So, I’m going to wear it like a ratty sweatshirt until it just completely falls apart.

If you think I should switch to another platform and you can’t wait to tell me all about it in the comments, well feel free.  But be warned, unless you’re sending me money, brownies, and guilt free jungle monkey sex, I’ll probably just ignore you. 

Anyway, fear not, most of the changes are under the hood. Mostly I’m making tweaks to how the pages load and streamlining how I gather statistics.

However, a couple of the modifications will affect you directly.

First, you’ll notice a sharp stabbing pain at the base of your skull. There may be some momentary nausea and disorientation.  Ignore that.

Second, there is now a floating social media banner to the left of the main posting field, making it easier to share content with the world. All the really cool blogs wear them like a pretty bow on their comely heads and I wanted one too. The usual share buttons are available, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Google+.  The counters may or may not be completely accurate, depending on when coding for each was enabled. Also, I’ve noticed the counts change depending on a number of factors. The Facebook count for the America post is way, way off, too low by like a bazillion.  I may have lost some data there, the current count is just back to the beginning of the year.  I’m tweaking the code, it should stabilize eventually.  Changes to the banner will be made as social media systems evolve.  Digg for example is mostly, but not quite, dead.  I included it just because I have a certain fondness for it.  But it’ll probably be replaced by something else eventually. The counter is page specific, or it’s supposed to be anyway.  So if you want to share a specific post, you have to be on that page, otherwise you’ll share Stonekettle Station itself. I’m good either way.

Third, the biggest change is to how Stonekettle Station handles commenting.  Comments are now embedded in a manner similar to WordPress blogs, i.e. there is no longer a separate primitive looking comments page, comments are embedded at the bottom of each post.  Also, note that you can now reply to specific comments by other readers, simply click “reply” under the comment you wish to address.  Remember the commenting rules, those haven’t changed.   If you have problems commenting or seeing the changes, you may need to clear your cache and/or cookies and reload the page.  Also note that Stonekettle Station is optimized for the latest versions of the popular browsers, if you’re using IE6 or older, you may have trouble displaying the site correctly – likely, if you’re using IE6, you and I probably aren’t going to be friends anyway, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, just saying.

Mobile versions of the website are available. Mobile sense is enabled and the compact version should load automatically on mobile devices, though I note that the tablet version of Chrome on Android 3.5 or higher mobile devices continues to display the full version of Stonekettle Station – probably because Android 3.5 is so awesome that it can play in the big leagues with full blown desktops. 

Other changes and updates will continue over the next few days. 

If I break the site and you are unable to enjoy my psychotic brain droppings pithy musings, I will see that you are justly compensated for your trouble: Liberals will receive a free bunny, conservatives will be impregnated against their will and forced to raise my bastard as their own in accordance with God’s plan, everybody else gets chocolate waffles.

 

Consider this an open forum. Squabble amongst yourselves.