newenigma

The website has under gone a few changes recently making it much more useable on mobile and tablet devices. Any screen sizes less than 960 pixels wide should pick up the changes, as long as they support CSS media queries. This should be all the latest browsers on phones and tablets, as well as all the latest desktop browsers.

Here is a screenshot of how one particular page displays on a mobile device.

There have been a fair few changes made to the stylesheets, and the jQuery javascript version has also been updated. Therefore, if something is not appearing right or not working, chances are your browser is loading cached versions of the stylesheets or javascript files. Either clear your browser cache, or a force refresh of the page should be sufficient.

This post is just to give an update on a few site enhancements that have been made recently.

• Site has been moved to a much more powerful server, so should be faster.
• Searching using the search form at the top of each page in the header has autocomplete on it. It will search as you type (minimum of 3 characters must be typed before the autocomplete kicks in) through albums, artists, movies, tv shows, enigma titles, enigma numbers and blog posts. This should come in handy if you want to quickly go to a particular enigma page.
• Most of the form fields have been updated to use some of the new HTML 5 attributes. This will probably only be noticeable to you in the main search form field at the top of each page, where the default text of 'Search Term...' appears. This is done using the new 'placeholder' attribute. You should be able to see this change in any decent modern browser.
• Help on using BBCode in the enigma responses has been added to the site. This can be seen by clicking the green 'i' icon just above the response textarea box, which will open up a popup/modal window.
• Previewing an enigma response is now done using AJAX so the whole page does not need to be reloaded anymore. The preview should now be much quicker to display. This requires Javascript to be enabled in your browser, so if you have Javascript disabled, the preview will not work.
• When receiving an email notification of a new enigma response, and clicking the link in the email, it will now take you to that particular response. Whilst this is how it normally behaved before, it failed when there had been more new responses which had taken the responses on to a new page, causing the response in the link to be on a previous page.

The following are planned updates which I will start working on as soon as possible.

• Ability to unsubscribe from receiving emails when a new enigma response is added to an enigma question where you have previously left a response.
• Ability to subscribe to an enigma question to receive emails whenever a new response is added to it, even if you have not previously added a response on that enigma question.

I have been working on a new design/layout for the site and below is a preview of what it may end up looking like. It's not finished yet and there is a possibility it may end up looking nothing like the preview, but for now this is what the preview looks like. The page shown in the preview is the albums index page.

Hopefully, the new design will be ready soon. I am hoping to have the site running under the new design in the next month or two.

Another minor update that has been done is to the accessibility of the site. I have added an icon to appear after any links which open up a new window to an external site. An example is shown here: Google

Another update has also been made to the login page. This will now redirect you to the page you came from when you clicked the login link. So for example, if you clicked on an enigma question link and were not logged in to the site, the page would provide a login link to click. After clicking this and successfully logging in, you will get redirected back to the enigma question that you were originally on. Before this was implemented, the login page always took you back to the home page, so this change should improve the user experience.

A recent comment posted in a response to an enigma question mentioned information on how to post images in the response. This particular response mentioned that only .jpeg images seemed to be allowed. I was pretty sure that .gif images were also allowed, so I went and checked the source code just to be sure. The actual allowed image formats according to the source code is: jpg, jpeg, gif, png. So at work, using Firefox browser, I posted a response to this, and included a .gif image in the response. I was able to see this image and so presumed that all was working as expected.

When I returned home and viewed the page from my own computer, I saw that the image I posted before was not being displayed, and instead an image about not hotlinking was displayed. No problem, I found another .gif image on the internet, and edited my response to include the new image. I previewed the response and all displayed ok, so I posted it. It was then I saw that the image was not being displayed.

3 or 4 hours later, I believed I had found a fix for it which was adding a blank url attribute to the body tag into the style sheet for the site. The image then displayed on the page and I thought it was all done. Unfortunately not. I went to a different enigma question page and added an image into a response, and previewed it. The image would not display.

I then removed all the background image urls from the stylesheet and the image then displayed. I also noticed that if somebody had already posted some images in a response which were displaying ok, if I edited the page and added an image above that response, then the image in the response would not display. It seemed as though the second image that appeared on the page would not display, but the first and any others after the second image would. This is the strangest bug I have ever seen regarding web browser rendering. Anyway, I put the style sheet back to how it was, and tried to do some more searching on the net. I came across a post mentioning Adblock Plus. I have this installed as an addon for Firefox, however, according to it, it says it was blocking zero items on my page, plus Firebug was showing no problems at all with the request and the response for the image that was not showing. I disabled Adblock Plus for my domain, and refreshed the page. The image now displayed, I refreshed lots more times just to make sure, and every time it displayed. I went to a few more enigma questions and previewed adding a repsonse with an image, and it all seemed to display correctly.

The browser I was using was the latest version of Firefox on the 3.0 series, which I think was 3.013. I downloaded Firefox 3.5 and installed that, and then tested again, with Adblock Plus enabled again. Images are displaying. I am still a bit worried that the underlying issue may still exist, and that some time in the future, I'm going to try and post an image, and it's not going to display. My concern is based on the fact that the problem disappeared when removing background images from the stylesheet, or even disabling all styles on the page.

I may start looking into getting a new design for the site, which will use a new stylesheet, as I am convinced that the issue is related somehow to the style sheet. However, for now, if images are not displaying, it appears upgrading to the latest version of Firefox should fix it.

If anyone experiences the issue of an image not displaying, please let me know. Information on the browser you use, what page you were trying to post on and the URL of the image would be very helpful. I can't promise that I'll be able to fix it though.

For those who are interested, the site has had a redesign with a new stylesheet. Unregistered users viewing the site will see the new design. Existing users can select the new design from their profile page by changing the stylesheet to 'default' in the dropdown box.

The site is also now making use of Apache mod rewrite for the enigma, albums and tv section, so that the url's look cleaner and are more search engine friendly.

There will be a new stylesheet coming in the future as I fancy a change. I have added in an option on your account where you can select which stylesheet to use. At the moment there are 2 but the second one is just a testing stylesheet and is basically a copy of the default one.

If anybody fancies doing their own stylesheet for the site, feel free to do so and I will then add it to the site so that it will be available to select.

Just a small update. I didn't like the profile page for users. It was just one long list of information stretching down the page, so the page has had a bit of a redesign and looks much better now. Here's my profile page for you to take a look at.

On a seperate note, I am going to add in the ability to leave comments on albums in the near future. Keep an eye out for this feature. It will work in the same way as the enigma responses do. If you leave a comment and somebody else then leaves a comment after you, you will get notified by email of the new comment.

The site has had a small update, mainly cosmetic. The background to the main content on each page has been changed and is now just a plain light blue gradient fade. The same has also been applied on the header, only in a dark orange/red colour.

The enigma index page has also received a small update, making it much easier to see which enigma questions are still open for comments, and which ones have their answers confirmed by the magazine.

The movie page has actually been up for about a week but I forgot to do a post for it. It can be found here and is just a list of all the movies I have seen.

The list of movies is obviously pretty small at the moment but I will keep adding to it and it will soon build up. I will also add a browse section to it fairly soon so that you can see all movies beginning with a particular letter for example.

EDIT: This browse section is now done.

Have recently carried out a small update to the header. The RSS and ATOM feeds are now directly available from the header. This serves 2 purposes. Firstly, it fills in a gap in the header and so it looks a little better, and secondly, it means I can remove the feeds from the sidebar menu so that the sidebar is not so long.

I have also made the text in the header that appears to the right of the logo part of the logo image. This was to simplify the header and also enabled me to use different fonts and position the text exactly where I wanted it to go.