Today, the 21st of September 2009 I rolled out preliminary support for portable devices with small screens. This support is restricted to story display and the new stories list and the updated serials list.
I will be rolling out support in other pages gradually.
For now, if you stumble on bugs, let me know and I’ll correct them. Also, if you have other suggestions that could help, let me know.
In the Update section you show only the updates for the last two days, according to the text above.
Please move the line for the update next to the the date of first posting, the way it is shown now is irritating.
I do not have an I-pod or similar, so no comment.
I am not sure if this is related to this update but, the update page only has one large bookmark button not the usual download arrangements.
The stories list looks quite nice on my Blackberry. It was also detected as small screen, so I didn’t have to change any settings, which is nice, too.
One request. Could you please add “HTML download” to the story display? Ebook is no go without a viewer, and the txt file is good otherwise but my (nokia) 5800 doesn’t know how to open “.bz2″. Or at least get it in .zip format.
I suspect (without any proof)that your server is set to save bandwith and bzip all data it can when sending to browser, and poor ol’ .txt file is the victim of it.
That said, I haven’t REALLY put time in to trying to solve the problem. If there’s any changes, I’ll let you know.
Looks and works good on the iPhone. Looking forward to the future rollout of the other pages
Just wanted to inform you that the secure login page, the webmaster contact page, and a bunch of other things are broken on the website as of 6am this morning, Eastern time.
Wanted to back up what leria said… I go to login and it tells me site is down but that could be a temporary thing. So I waited a day and tried again..said the same thing.
I’ve been reading almost exclusively on my Blackberry for more than a year now & forced it back to the old display that has been working well for me.
Just got a kindle and tried to access the site. Could not get pass the login screen even in advanced mode with javascript enabled. It kept sending me to a clean up page and then back to login.
Anyone successfully accessed the site using kindle before?
@Jonathan
Unfortunately, the Kindle doesn’t support cookies. So you can’t log into the site with it.
on my droid (854×480, Android 2.0), stories look alright, but the page is always (portrait or landscape, any default zoom level and text size) a bunch of pixels too wide, so i have about a millimeter of margin on the left, and clipped text on the right.
i have to scroll every chapter page horizontally to see the clipped text (just a few characters) on the right.
it looks like the text area is the right size (i.e., 100.0% of whatever my screen width happens to be), but the margin is added to that.
might that be tweaked somehow?
Margin is set to ‘auto’, so, theoretically, it’s the way it should be and it works perfectly on the iphone. Also, theoretically, since the iphone and android have the same html rendering engine (webkit) it should work the same way.
I made some minor changes to the ‘body’ tag stylesheet. Let me know if it helps.
I use a Sony PRS-600 Reader, and generally, it seems to do okay with the ePub formats.
The one exception that I seem to have found so far is, for some reason, MWTB’s “Growing Up a Master”. Three other stories of his work fine as an ePub and I can read them without problem. However, when I try to access the GUaM story, either on my Reader or on my PC’s reader, that particular ePub file crashes the reader program. What is even more annoying is that, if I try to manually put GUaM onto my Reader, then when I reach that story while scrolling through the list of titles on my Reader, the Reader suddenly blanks the screen and resets itself.
@Griezz
I checked the file, and I couldn’t find a problem with it. I opened it with stanza on the Mac, on the iPhone and with Calibre on the Mac and it opened in all cases. Just in case, I forced the system to recreate the ePub file. Try downloading it again, just in case the first time there was some transmission errors that caused a corruption.
Nothing changed for me; the story view still is a few pixels wider than my screen, on my Android 2.0.
I’m guessing that /bit/stories.css retrieved with chrome on my desktop (win7) is NOT the small-screen/mobile CSS, right?
How could I view (and play with) the small-screen site version on a desktop?
Of course not, the stories.css is not for the mobile version.
If you click on ‘Settings’ in the new stories page, and from the screen size menu, select small, save, then load a story, the site will deliver the mobile stylesheet.
thanks. let’s see what is going on…
#story, #top-header, #bott-header
{
width: 100%;
}
i think that’s the problem. this directive not only applies to div#story, but it is also inherited by all its children (H2 and Ps).
so the children are 100% wide, and the div#story has padding, so the div#story has to be wider than 100%.
i can observe the “over-wide” issue on firefox too, now that i set it to the storiesiphone.css style.
indeed, using the web developer plugin and removing that 100% directive solves the issue at least in firefox.
ah i’m talking nonsense.
removing that directive still solves the issue, but my explanation was wrong.
the width property isn’t inherited. rather, it’s an issue with the box model, it seems. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug for details.
#story is set to 100%, but it also has padding:8pt. 100% plus padding is wider than the screen.
I’ve changed it to 98%.
I test on an iphone and the iphone doesn’t have the horizontal scrolling problem with width of 100%. I saw it previously on firefox and safari. Since Android’s html engine is the same as the iphone (webkit) it never occurred to me that it would be a problem.
yeah, the 98% helped. thanks!
i’d guess the iPhone has more advanced “site-area” recognition routines and also knows about common patterns “in the wild”, especially stuff that’s not at all intuitive about the CSS box model.
at 98%, the whole text fits on my phone screen (800×480). i can still scroll though, but that’s only by a few pixels (borders). i don’t know what the width attribute would accomplish here, but i can only talk about android and Firefox, not any of the other popular browsers like IE/safari/opera.
Is it possible to download to a format that is convertible by Kindle? I tried ePub eBook, but when I sent the resultant file to kindle, it wasn’t recognized.
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