Rolling coverage

Hey all, since the last time I wrote one of these, detailing some of the structural changes I made on the site, I’ve been busy doing this and that.  

If you’re using THP on a mobile device, you may have noticed some of those efforts. The most obvious being the addition of a settings menu. The options available are fewer than for desktop users but I hope to add more over time. There are still issues to deal with before all that but the groundwork has been put into place.

And, well, as you might imagine, I also made several tweaks to the relevant bits of structure and CSS. The end goal of all of this is to make THP work the same (or just about) across all screen sizes and devices. There are still too many caveats and exceptions that are there out of necessity; in a sense the code base is slightly bloated due to the need to handle every scenario. Simplicity has two main benefits: pages are faster to load (and require less resources) and the code becomes easier to maintain.  

It’s fair to say that the time I’ve dedicated to working on the site the last two weeks or so has generally focused on unglamorous work like that. Just so I don’t spend too many words describing what would probably make for dull reading I offer a brief list and an image of some of my commits:

• Added settings for mobile users
• Changes to some of the structure and way of displaying the postbox
• Styling fixes and alterations for board pages
• Simplified and reorganized some of the user script bits
• The front page got a few minor structural changes  
• Styles for the front page were changed; some font-sizes increased, margins between edge of a box changed, colors tweaked and should overall be more consistent across different window/screen sizes
• The way user-selected styles are applied have been changed in the scripts
• The way banners are put on board pages has been changed
• Max banner image size and other properties have been specified in CSS
• Minor code optimization in ajax requests
• Updated the FAQ
• Drafted and posted new moderation rules for THP 

So with that out of the way I can finally get to some of the other stuff I want to talk about. Namely, what I’ll be working on in the near future. For the most part, I think it’s going to continue being small things like the above. I want to keep polishing code and simplifying things as much as possible so that harder tasks down the line aren’t quite so difficult. Without the changes to the thread/board structure last month, the mobile changes I made recently would have more difficult and I’d have to redo them if I then did those other reforms.

There’s no one area that I’m currently thinking of focusing on as there’s miscellanea everywhere. I might even give a go at dealing with one of the oldest and most pervasive chunks of spaghetti code still in THP’s backend.  

That said, it’s not like I’m completely aimless. An overhaul of the story list is definitely on the horizon. In order to do that, I have to lay some groundwork for that and that means trialing things like tags and synopses. And there’s still matters of customization for the user-facing parts of the site that I have planned that I haven’t gotten to either. There’s a strong possibility that things like that and other previews of upcoming features may debut in cupcakes sometime in the future. I’ll let you know when the time comes.  

Until next time, take it easy!