Following up from my last update, the site now has consistent article views to the top page news. Underneath the hood, I broke out the common routines and integrated the same theme calls. This not only provides a consistent look, but should carry forward if I ever update the theme. I need to clean up and optimize the code but that won’t change the user experience.
I’ve been wanting to make this change forever. I updated the category listings to now look more like the front page for the site. That is, it uses better styling and image previews. Probably not the final design, but I found few bugs and cleaned a number of things up. I still need to update the tags, but the overall look is much better.
Users won’t notice this change directly, but I added some filters to my program administration page. I wanted an easier way to search and find programs missing elements (think images, articles, etc.). To my surprise, I found a couple ZX81 programs missing their respective articles. I call that success.
As I was moving icons over to Bootstrap’s, I started to notice that some inconsistencies in usage. Edit was sometimes a pencil, and sometimes a pencil in a square. I found the same problem with other icons. This led me down a journey of editing a large swath of files to make them more consistent. Given I was already there, I took the opportunity to make some enhancements to improve usage. I think everything is working, but I’m sure I have a few more bugs to squash.
I’m giving Bootstrap icons a go on my site. I’ve been using FontAwesome for years, but it is always fun to try new things. You’ll still find a mix on the site while I work through all the files and articles. I really should turn my article header’s into some sort of BBCODE. That way as my style changes, I don’t have to edit hundred’s of articles.