Foremost, thank you to everyone who reads Collected Editions and especially who stops by and leaves a comment. As I’ve said before, there might be a Collected Editions without you all, but it wouldn’t be near as much fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
No one’s more astounded by 18 years than me. I appreciate you all, and I’ve no intention of stopping now. All best.
The last time Collected Editions had a major template update was 2013, and 10 years later, I started thinking about a new template timed for the blog’s 20th anniversary in two years. But once I reacquainted myself with the site design, I got very caught up in the tinkering, and now here we are (I’ve got something else big planned for 20!). I’ve been working on this new template compulsively for the last six months, and I could probably go another six months or more before I’m done tweaking. But, I’ve learned of late that at some point you’ve got to ship and then build from there, so that’s what I’m doing.
I’ll be taking you on the next part of the template-building journey with me. Not to worry — still a comics-focused blog! But I’m eager to program out loud, a little. I’ve just spent six months going from finding Blogger completely inscrutable to actually pretty customizable and it seems a shame not to share what I’ve learned, especially when so many comics bloggers of a certain era got their start on the platform.
Among site improvements I’ll mention right now:
Dark mode. Blessed dark mode. I’ll be pleased not to burn my eyes out when I go to respond to comments in the evenings and I hope you will be, too. (The ability to manually toggle dark mode on the site is coming!)
New mobile experience. Most of the visitors to the site are reading on mobile devices. I’m happy for you to enjoy the site however you like, whether RSS, your browser’s reading mode, desktop, or what have you, but if you arrive on mobile, I want the site to be immediately, eminently readable. That has not been the case previously, but it should be now.
Less is more. If I can claim any sort of focused design aesthetic for the site over the past 18 years, then at least for the previous template from 2013, the goal was to put the emphasis back on the reading experience. For those of you who’ve been here that long, you might remember a right sidebar packed with material that ran almost the length of most posts. The 2013 redesign increased the sidebar count from one to two, but splitting the extraneous material between two sidebars hopefully meant that at some point reading a post, you got down to a place where it was just you and the text, with no additional material on either side.
Now, I’ve gone completely sidebar-less. Self-promotion best practices would likely tell me that’s the wrong thing to do, but at this moment it seems very right to get back to a more innocent time — you and the thing I wrote, and nothing else. In an age of interminable “please disable your adblocker” popups and social media sites that won’t display anything unless you’re logged in, getting out of the way of the readers and my content feels exceptionally satisfying.
And even less. To that end, I’ve struck a lot of JavaScript from the site, a lot of third-party social buttons with functions out of my control, so on and so forth. There are still some analytics happening, just for my own curiosity as to what posts are being read and by how many, but believe you me, I’m not knowingly collecting any personally identifying data and wouldn’t even know how if I wanted to. And I’ll be documenting what’s in use later on. Again, just my attempt to build a site that runs the way I wish more of the web would run.
I’ll be pointing out the variety of influences on the site redesign as I go. One of these is David Merfield’s writing on the ideal website at the home of his Blot blogging platform (as well as gleaning some inspiration from Blot’s templates). I take the principles mentioned there very much to heart.
I hope you enjoy the updated Collected Editions; I hope it’s an improvement for you. If I’ve wholly broken something, please let me know so I can add it to the punch list. A new review coming Thursday. Here we go.
Where are the old posts?
ReplyDeleteHopefully this is fixed now. Let me know if it isn’t!
DeleteVery sleek design. I like it, especially on mobile. Just one thing: is it just me or is there only one article per page? And no "next page"/"previous page" buttons? Seems a bit too minimalistic to me. 😄
ReplyDeleteBTW I had no idea this website has already been around this long. To many more years! 🙂 Thanks for all the content you provide. Your paperback timeline was immensely helpful when I first started reading comics about 10 years ago. And nowadays your solicitation write-ups always help me to keep track of new releases. Thank you!
Thanks for the kind words, and glad the site resources have been useful to you!
DeleteThis is why it was a good idea to go ahead and ship the template, because you've identified some things that maybe I didn't realize. So first of all, when you say "one article per page," wasn't it always just one article per page? Like, the homepage listed a bunch of recent posts (which it does now, too, only one gets a "spotlight" and a few more are under "Recent Posts"), but when you followed a link, there would only be one post on a page. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
In terms of "next page/previous page" navigation, I did indeed remove it from the homepage, but it's still present on each individual post page. I figured maybe that wasn't necessary on the homepage since you've got the Review Index link in the top menu, six posts on the homepage to choose from, and then the hierarchical list of all the site's posts in order on the footer ...
What's that you say? There's *nothing* on the footer?!
Clearly coding in public is going to be fun. When I went to look at the site to see why you (and a few others) were suggesting there was no navigation, lo and behold, most of the footer was missing! I was sure it was like an unclosed DIV tag or something, but a lot of refactoring, tearing out the guts, etc. wasn't bringing the footer back. And weirdly enough, I could see the footer widgets when I looked at the site in preview, but not on the site itself.
This Stack Overflow answer put me on the right track. Not the answer per se, but that widgets can contain a "mobile='yes'" attribute. There's some funniness in the Blogger settings --> Theme --> drop-down menu --> Mobile Settings where you can choose to show a mobile view on mobile devices or a desktop view on mobile devices. This allows for a whole separate template on mobile, but in my case, I'm using the same template, just with different CSS styles for different media breakpoints. Once I set it to show the desktop version on mobile, the footer widgets came back. 😅
Is the navigation better for you now? Thanks again!
Congratulations! Your site has been invaluable for about a decade now to me as a guide of what's coming out on the DC trades side of things, and of what is or is not worth reading, specially in more recent times, when a lot of the old bloggers have stopped posting and most of what's left is a bunch of overhyped paid reviews. The new design looks nice, but, as I see another commenter already told you, it feels weird that the homepage only shows a preview of the most recent post, and only shows you the title of the other ones; instead of how it was before where you'd get a paragraph of the last ten or so postings.
ReplyDeleteEither way, your articles are great and I plan to keep visiting this site regulary as I've done for the last decade. Here's to another 18 years of collected editions!
And thank you for the kind words, too! One of the fun things about marking 18(!) years is seeing how many people, like yourself, have been here a while; this community is such a joy for me.
DeleteSo that's another question about the one-post-and-list-of-links approach to the homepage. Another inspiration — that approach had its roots in Wordpress' Vivre template, which admittedly was too minimal even for me! (And some of my headlines were just too long to make that kind of thing work.)
But it begs the question, is being able to scan over the intros of the last 5-10 posts something you use a lot? As mentioned, I mostly follow blogs via RSS, so when a site has a new post, it shows up in my RSS reader email-like; I don't really use homepages to know if I want to read an article or not. And additionally my thinking here was like, it says "Review: Catwoman" or "Review: Batman: Detective Comics" — it's not hard to know what the topic of the post is. And on mobile, you were only getting like one or two sentences from the intro anyway.
But maybe you like to scan the homepage for a quick spoiler-free take on a book? Tell me more — the good thing about the new template is I'm a lot better able to customize it than I was before, so I'm open to improvements if something could be made better!
I've only recently started using RSS, usually, I'd visit the homepage and use that first paragraph for each article as a guide to whether I might be interested in the book being discussed or not, and thus decide if I want to read the whole article. To me, a title usually isn't enough to make me click, specially on articles about titles I'm not familiar with. However, I might not be representative of most user of this site. I'm not a mobile user, for example, which most people seem to be.
DeleteI can say I'm giving this a heavy think. I could add short previews under the recent post titles, though I'm not sure if it would be enough to make that useful. I promise I'll noodle around a little bit and see how it turns out.
DeleteNice one! Thank you for this site. It is part of my daily routine so even though we are strangers to each other, we are still connected by our love of comics which is beautiful. I am happy our collective hobby provides so much joy to so many people and that you use this site to share your passion. Much appreciated and I wish you many happy years.
ReplyDeleteBart, such a nice sentiment. I really appreciate it!
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