I made few changes to the site in the past few days. I thought I’d talk about them a bit.
The first two changes are in the way the voting mechanism and the feedback mechanism work at the end of stories. I’ve added some JavaScripts to make the forms submit to the site and return feedback without having to reload the whole page.
The reason for the change is to make a better user interface. Previously (and currently if you don’t have JavaScript active in your browser or doesn’t have a supported browser), when a reader clicked the vote button in the voting form or send button in the mail form, the whole page would change, so to do both, one usually had to hit the back button once.
With the change, the form simply goes away and the text changes to reflect the result.
Overall, it works very well. Most people have recent browsers and most people have JavaScript active.
The transition for the voting form was almost trouble free, but the one for the mail form was quite bumpy. The reason for the bumpiness is mostly my inexperience with the new technology that I’m using in the new forms; I’m learning it as I implement it. Many readers had the mail form fail to send or return any results and it took me a couple of days to sort out why it’s happening and how to go about solving the issue. But it also took longer to sort because very few people reported the problem; only two people reported it.
To help me fix any current or future problems with the site, I would appreciate it if those problems were reported to me. The webmaster link on the site provides an easy way to do it.
So, if the new forms are not working for you, let me know. In the Webmaster’s contact page, select the message type as Bug Report.