New stuff: Sortable tables, front page Tweets and more
- This topic has 24 replies, 17 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 11 months ago by Scottie.
- AuthorPosts
- 4th April 2013, 10:11 at 10:11 am #132980Keith CollantineKeymaster
Some new features have been added to the site today, here’s a quick run-down:
Sortable tables
Some tables on the site can now be sorted by you as you wish to make the data a bit more flexible and interactive. Click on a column to sort the data by it, or hold down shift and click on multiple columns to sort the data in more than one way.
You’ll see more and more tables on the site making use of this – here’s four which are available already:
Howe many races each driver started and finished
Which drivers were eliminated in Q1, Q2 and Q3
Penalties by driver
Pit stops strategies by driverThese tables can be distinguished from normal, un-sortable tables by the blue colouring on the top bar.
Front page Tweet
I often use Tweets to alert F1 Fanatic’s 50,000-plus followers to relevant content on the site that might not be immediately obvious from the homepage. The most recent Tweet now appears at the top of the homepage so those who aren’t following can also get the benefit of that.
Search
There’s an interim fix for the broken search field.
Lessening homepage clutter
Space on the homepage is at a premium on race weekends so old F1 Fanatic Live posts will now disappear when they are out of date. For those paying very close attention, this is why the total number of articles on the site appears to have just fallen by over 500.
RSS
Due to the persistent use of the RSS feed for copyright infringement and content theft, F1 Fanatic is now providing article summaries instead of full text via the feed.
Mobile login
Mobile users should now find a ‘log in’ button at the top of the site as had been requested.
Other changes
There have also been various CSS tweaks and fixes and some changes to the positioning of ads for mobile devices.
4th April 2013, 11:12 at 11:12 am #230989RetiredParticipantGreat improvment mate. Nice we can now embed images and videos.
4th April 2013, 11:51 at 11:51 am #230990Keith CollantineKeymaster@jeff1s Thanks but that’s not new – it’s been around quite a while!
4th April 2013, 12:27 at 12:27 pm #230991AlbertoParticipantSad to see the full text RSS feed gone. This won’t stop people from coming to your website and stealing content… but may as well stop me from reading your posts. Most of my reading is done offline, during my commute, where I read articles downloaded via RSS. I guess that’s over now.
4th April 2013, 13:21 at 1:21 pm #230992Keith CollantineKeymaster@hubbadubbadubba Of course I do not like to take features away from those using them legitimately but in this case the scope for abuse had become too great (the vast majority of content theft I’ve observed is occurring through RSS feed scraping) compared to the value of retaining it.
It’s also worth noting that some content did not display correctly in the feed anyway: interactive graphs, for example.
However I’m grateful for the feedback and would like to hear from anyone else in the same position. It may be possible to offer the ability to view articles offline some other way in future.
4th April 2013, 14:31 at 2:31 pm #230993RoaldParticipantJust sharing my opinion, but the front page tweet looks like my browser messed up loading the website. It needs integration with the layout, maybe putting it in a coloured bar like the menu above it would make it look better.
Question though, did you ever receive/read my e-mail regarding the use of the @
tags? 4th April 2013, 14:42 at 2:42 pm #230994Keith CollantineKeymaster@Roald This is the second piece of feedback I’ve had which suggests the revised style sheet isn’t loading for everyone at the moment. I’m looking into it.
4th April 2013, 15:11 at 3:11 pm #230995jh1806ParticipantOne small suggestion re the sortable tables – it took me a while to realise they were sortable as the header cells don’t suggest they are clickable. Underlining the header text or having the cursor change on mouseover would be a nice hint.
Have some free CSS :D
.tablesorter th { text-decoration:underline; cursor:pointer; }
4th April 2013, 16:41 at 4:41 pm #230996CornflakesParticipantAs with @Roald the tweet looks like a messed up load on the homepage. I’m using Chrome but checked it on Firefox and it looked fine. So I guess it’s a problem relating to Chrome browsers.
Also, as @jh1806 mentions, making it more obvious that tables are interactive will help more casual viewers of the site. Cheers
5th April 2013, 5:49 at 5:49 am #230997andae23ParticipantNot sure if it’s intentional, but the Tweet on the home page is not your latest Tweet.
5th April 2013, 8:14 at 8:14 am #230998Biggles209ParticipantI’m with the earlier comment regarding the RSS feed. I read offline a lot, and without this, I’ll probably stop using the site. There were a few issues (like the interactive graphs), but once you understood these it was easy to go back online later if the content was sufficiently interesting.
5th April 2013, 8:16 at 8:16 am #230999matt88ParticipantAs a daily commuter and Kindle owner, the possibility to exploit services that automatically download RSS feeds on the ebook reader is unvaluable, and the F1 Fanatic round-up was among my regular morning reads. I’m sorry I won’t have this chance any more, but I understand that content robbers are far more than a worry nowadays.
5th April 2013, 8:36 at 8:36 am #231000Don SpeekingleeshParticipantI’ll desperately miss the full RSS feed. This site is my most read F1 site and first port of call in my feed reader, but if I can’t read the stories in the reader it’ll have to fall back in line with the other sites – where first to post a story gets read, and other sites only maybe if I think their take will be sufficiently different.
While it’s not nice to see your content being infringed, is it actually costing you money? Would putting ads in the RSS feed possibly help, or making it supporters only?5th April 2013, 9:03 at 9:03 am #231001Aish HeydrichParticipantHow about a “Go to Top” button in the bottom right corner, as we scroll down way down due to long articles and sometimes even 30 to 40 comments down along with replies they become full threads longer than in the forums, scrolling up can be a pain.
5th April 2013, 9:35 at 9:35 am #231002Keith CollantineKeymaster@don-speekingleesh The number one source of traffic (and therefore a significant source of revenue) to F1 Fanatic is Google. Content theft via RSS has had a measurable negative effect on that.
Again, it’s useful to have feedback on whether anyone was taking advantage of the ability to read offline, so thanks @matt88 and @biggles209 for that.
@aish Visitors on desktop browsers can just hit ‘home’ on their keyboards, though this could be considered for those on mobile devices.
- AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.