Post Sections ⇅
- 13th October 2023
- 25th September 2023
- 5th September 2023
- 14th July 2023
- Work Ongoing
- Known Issues
- Reported & Fixed Problems
Hey all. Here, I intend on keeping a fairly up-to-date log of work I’m doing on the site as a whole, along with any known or reported issues. Producing content regularly matters, but so to does your experience while on my blog. In a world of short attention spans (mine included), bugs and annoyances can quickly put us off. I am trying to minimise both of those!
If you come across an issue please report it on either Twitter or Facebook and I’ll either fix it quickly, or add it here.
13th October 2023
A sudden clash between my CSS tabs and WordPress’ auto-paragraph (wpautop) meant that I have had to temporarily (I hope) disable autop.
This will lead to some formatting issues on posts where I have used carriage returns instead of HTML <p> tags.
I will endeavour to fix these, but have to prioritise content that is needed in the here and now. If you see a page massively messed up, please contact me over Social Media:
25th September 2023
I have fixed a bug that was preventing you from pinning an article’s contents list on larger screens.
To use this feature, click/tap on the up/down arrows. The Hide/Show button keeps a “tab” in place, but hides the list so that it does not take more screenspace than is necessary.
Note: for obvious reasons, security issues will not be posted here.
5th September 2023
The “Upper Body” section of the Farmers Faire Cosmetics page has a bug and is currently disabled. All upper body pieces from the event are accessible. See the “All” and “A-Z” tabs.This is largely fixed.- A recurring festival currency icon bug is, well, recurring. I need to fix it as it fills my error logs.
14th July 2023
Stage 1 of a major “under-the-hood” reworking of code has been done. This update is a user-centric one, designed to improve your experience on-site.
Most of this centred around two themes: Site Speed and Visual Feel. My aim has been to get you to the page/posts’ content as quickly as possible but add a bit of fluff so your stay is nice too.
I expect teething issues, especially on small layout tweaks. I’m working to check that, functionally, everything’s working.
What’s in this Update?
15th July
As far as I am able, the mobile menu is now working properly. I’ve tested Firefox and Chrome for Android. I’ll monitor it after the weekend.
- UI/Appearance/Layout
- Header image has been removed in favour of the navigation. This gets you to the content you actually came for quicker.
- A smoother layout shift as the screen and window size changes. There are some edge/interim cases that may need addressing later on down the line.
- Gallery/Lightbox: a new method has been put in for these, including detection as to whether the page requires the files or not.
- System
- I’ve detached my site from the Javascript/jQuery that was underpinning the layout “grid”.
- CSS/JavaScript has also been removed where backwards compatibility had previously been needed, but styles/functions are supported as standard in 95%+ of browsers.
- CSS files reduced, or only loaded on relevant pages/categories.
→ This work is ongoing as I work through the relevant plugins to reduce their code, and the load they place on the site. - WordPress was producing random blank paragraph tags. I’ve tried to eliminate these, but that can sometimes cause unintended effects. It only seems to happen on certain pages, so I’ll be making a list to work through soon.
- Post Table of Content (ToC)
- Extra styling
- Clarity of open/close state buttons, especially for mobile (though works for all devices)
- Fixed a bug that could result in several blank entries at the end of a page’s list in some situations.
- Sidebar
- Better Styling
- Fewer Database Calls for quicker loading
- I’ve put in place the ability to toggle featured posts on/off. Before, I was having to manually put them in with code. I still need to update this so that LOTRO posts only have the LOTRO recommendations and not both LOTRO and FFXIV, for example.
- Category Pages
I actually put “heavier” images in here. The smaller ones, though quicker, looked terrible due to their size. I’ve only gone one image size higher, so I hope it will have minimal impact on load times. I just try to balance speed with appearance. - A few bits of visual “eye-candy” for larger-screen users.
- Per-Page Themes
This update allows me to bring slight tweaks to specific pages’ colours without forcing those rules to be loaded everywhere! I don’t use it often, but times like the LOTRO Anniversary and Spring Festival Guide, for example, lend themselves to a bit of special treatment.
What’s To Come?
This is round one. The rest, important to me as they are, will be smaller and hopefully won’t need downtime.- Sidebar: as mentioned, I just need to make sure highlights are relevant to the category. That should be pretty quick.
- Dark Mode: offering the option to anonymously switch to dark mode for the session. This is not a colour inverter. I’m literally writing a new colour scheme so it’s pleasant to look at. I am light sensitive, so if I’m not comfortable, it’s not going live!
- More Speed: I have more plugins to go through and either remove JavaScript/jQuery/CSS or to intelligently load it only where it’s needed.
- Old CSS: there is a bit of old CSS still flying around. It’s collected a lot of dust over the years! So, I’m cleaning as I go.
Welp! I’m seeing weird styling or other oddities!
While I’ve done my best to avoid change-over issues, the one thing I cannot control is your own device. You’ll need to do some cache clearing, or if it’s your ISP, wait until they change their caches. I’ve cleared all of mine server-side already.A “hard refresh” may also help. For example, in Firefox, holding the Shift Key while pressing the Refresh button can fetch the latest files.Work Ongoing
Aspects I am proactively working on.- The new site layout, plugin updates and bug fixes relating to that. See above…and below!
Known Issues
Minor annoyances and/or bugs I will move to Work Ongoing in due course.Known Issues
- Marginal cascading layout issues on the LOTRO Calendar. Will be fixed in a near-future update.
- If a FFXIV Hunting Log target has no other (hunting log specific) enemies in the area, the title “Other Hunting Log Targets in the Area” appears but with a blank space under it. → this will be removed in due course.
- The ToC has a gap on the left. This is currently intentional as it prevents paragraph text from running into it when the ToC is deeper than the header image. My aim is to find a workaround to also remove that gap.
Reported & Fixed Problems
Reported Problems
- 13th July 2023: Users have reported finding it difficult to dismiss the cookie bar on the mobile version of the Vivaldi browser. While I cannot reproduce this right now, I’m leaving it here as a note, in case others also report it.
May 2023
The website has been moved to a new server with more resources. If you encounter any issues, please do get in touch via Social Media. While the change has been successful, there may still be niggles and optimisations. If you come across any issues in connecting to the site, please let me know.
Hunting Logs
Date Fixed: May 2023 All FFXIV Hunting Logs appear to be being indexed by search engines. Never quick enough, but better than not at all!
Missing LOTRO Cosmetics (Item) Pages Link
Date Fixed: 4th October 2022 This seems to only happen on individual item pages, but error in making the Buried Treasure event guide link. 04/10/22: This should be fixed, but I’ll monitor it.
Missing
Date Fixed: 4th October 2022 Ranks 4 and 5 were missing the overall EXP given for clearing the whole rank. Individual stages were fine. This has now been corrected.Granted for Rank Completion
