Welcome!
This is the new home of the California High Speed Rail Blog. After over a year and a half at Blogger, we’ve decided to move up in the world to a unique URL and a WordPress installation.
Have a look around, try things out. Note the new comments system, which enables threaded comments using the AJAX system (enabling instantaneous posting of comments without having to reload the page and lose your place). Consider registering your username for posting here – you don’t have to, but it would be helpful.
And please read over the comments policy. It’s nothing new, but a formalization of our general practices.
Use this RSS feed to update your systems (also listed in the right-hand side of the menubar). As always, our Twitter account is @cahsr, and is also listed in the menubar.
Many, many, many thanks to Avery Smith at The Smiths Design for the final blog design you see before you, which incorporates much of the initial feedback on the new site from some of the regular commenters.
A note: the transfer from Blogger is incomplete. Owing to a problem at Google, which owns and manages Blogger, comments posted prior to November 11, 2009 haven’t yet been imported, though all 600 or so posts have been successfully imported. There are problems with this across Blogger and I expect they will be resolved before long. In earlier testing we have been able to successfully import all 20,000+ comments, and we expect to do so again before long. The old site remains as an archive, and will be there for as long as Blogger exists.
Any other bugs or problems? Let me know in the comments!
And the automatic feed to the Twitter account works too. Excellent. I love it when a plan comes together.
It’s annoying to have only 50 comments to a page, especially on a blog like this, where comment threads frequently run into 100+ territory. Could you change that?
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 12:50 am
I set it to 200 comments per page. That should be a good balance for now.
Alon Levy Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Thanks!
I just have to fix the yellow text boxes and buttons, probably later tonight.
@ Robert Cruickshank, Avery -
thank you for all the work you’ve put in to move the site over to WordPress.
very very nice.
Looks great!
Nice work!
Any way to highlight the new comments in threads? It used to be very easy to simply hit refresh and see the newest comments on the bottom. It’s more complicated to now sift through everything.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Yeah, that is an issue. Looking into ways to deal with that.
Peter Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Cool, thanks.
I like the new site but a few minor things could be tweaked IMO
- The border around the entire site seems a little bit thick/dark and is somewhat distracting.
- There’s not quite enough white space around all posts; they especially seem to bump up against the navigation on the right.
- Overall, the typography seems a bit too cramped, maybe more space between paragraphs and lines?
- The captcha is really difficult; could it be moved to reCaptcha or something?
Other than that I love it, especially the threaded comments, which will be a huge improvement over the old site.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I’ll look into the captcha, and the typography does seem a bit cramped. I’ll look into that as well.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Thanks for these suggestions. I don’t agree with you on the first two, but let’s see how it works for a few days.
I added space between paragraphs in the posts, which already seems to help immensely. I’m not sure Verdana is the best font to use, it was the default on the theme. I briefly switched it to Arial and it didn’t quite work. I’m open to suggests on fonts.
I also moved to reCaptcha, which also seems a far better solution than what I’d had before.
Lookin’ good! RC, thanks for all the time you put into this.
Also, is there any way for a user to delete comments he or she made?
I sometimes jump the gun on my comments and have to backtrack to fix them up.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
I don’t believe there is. Just gonna have to be careful before hitting post, or be willing to live with a few errors.
Peter Reply:
November 29th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Ok, I’ll do my best.
sweet! Lookin Good
Don’t mind me, it’s just Robert testing the system…