Now that we’ve been in our new location for a little over 3 months, and most of the old posts have been relocated, I thought this would be a good time to ask for your feedback.
Christian has been working very hard on the site to make your experience a good one. He set up a mobile phone/PDA friendly interface with progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers (did you understand all that? I hope so because I sure didn’t *g*) so that you can view the site on the go and also leave comments that way. I notice that many of you are using the mobile browser (especially Ingrid). *g* Christian has also made a number of other enhancements at your request on the “comments” feature and elsewhere on the site and he has added a widget to speed up the site so that the delays that were encountered on the blog are hopefully a thing of the past. There are many more enhancements but they are waaaay too technical for me to write about.:) Oh, I almost forgot, there is a radio here that you can use free of charge – Lost FM rocks!
But that doesn’t mean that we’re complacent. As I said when we moved, we want you to regard this site as your online home away from home. With that in mind I made a few changes and I’m wondering if you like them, (or not) –
I have asked a number of authors who have been interviewed on the site to be guest bloggers so that you can get different opinions on many topics. I’m sure you welcome the break from my posts and I know you have been enjoying the guest bloggers, going by the sheer numbers.
Also, starting this week M.L. Rhodes, author, will be sharing her opinions on different gay movies and the first one to be reviewed is Shelter.
We have increased the number of guest reviewers because the available M/M books have doubled recently, and I know you are loving Val, Kassa, and Jenre in addition to Aunt Lynn, Kris and maybe sometimes, yours truly – Christian is way too busy maintaining the site to review books.
Many authors are now donating their M/M books on the site as “free” books and I would like to thank them for their generosity. Amber Allure is continuing to offer its M/M books every week as “free” books to readers, and Bristlecone Pine Press has also donated a number of its ebooks as “free” books on the site. Many thanks to these publishers!
Starting today Tam is going to be our new roving Reporter and she will regale you with her exploits. You have already seen a few of her posts but now she’s official.*g*
I haven’t seen any recent complaints from you, other than about the occasional server problem which relates to the hosting company for the website, but I do have other plans that I’m thinking of to make the site more accessible and improve the content. However, before I do anything I would like your opinion about the changes that are now in place, and what you would like to see in terms of new content. Sorry, Christian is not available as one of the Friday Guys – he’s got a hot new man and he’s busy tuning him up.:-D
Please leave your comments on the post.
I’m enjoying the mix of content between reviews and interviews and general discussion topics. Love that variety.
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If I have a complaint, it’s about the sidebar on the right. It seems to be very “busy” now and not arranged in any kind of logical order – for example it seems odd that the box for number of visitors is right up there at the top and your “Welcome, here’s what this site is all about” bit is further down and needs to be scrolled down to before it’s visible.
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Maybe it just needs to be streamlined and grouped more logically. And maybe some new static pictures, just to ring the changes. 🙂 And I still haven’t figured out why there’s a picture of Storm from the X-Men there. Well, she’s cool I suppose! 😀
Ha ha!! I just asked the same thing about Storm!
JFM
I’m going to try this once more. My original response was eaten by WordPress.
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Storm was all me. I happen to love the character in X-Men and I like Halle as well but it’s time for her to go,:) I’ll move one more picture and replace it with something else but I really love the ones that are on the site.:)
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“Welcome” was originally a ‘sticky’ post, which means it was the first post you saw when you logged on to the site. But after 2-1/2 months I thought it was time to replace it with something else – “Readers Favourite Gay Books.” However I’ll move it to above “Navigation.”
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We’ll take a look at the overall site and see if we can’t make it more “intelligent”.
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Thanks for these suggestions BTW – they are really good.
Fair enough, Storm is cool. Not as cool as Trinity from The Matrix, but pretty cool. 😉
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And here I was thinking it was something to do with the whole mutations being a metaphor for homosexuality in the X-Men universe, but I do tend to overthink things.
The only thing I would say is that I would prefer that it was set up like I have Speak Its Name, so there’s just a summary on my LJ feed – many people read their feeds at work, and I know several people who won’t put this blog on their feed list because of the nudity, specially on Fridays. I would be the same if I was at work, but luckily, I’m not!!
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How do you leave spaces between paragraphs in comments? Some people manage to do it!!
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And I have to ask – what is Storm doing on the site?
Hi Erastes
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First the paragraphs. All you have to do is hit ‘enter’ and place an asterisk at the beginning of the line, then hit ‘enter’ again and -voila, a paragraph is made.
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Re the feed, most of the bloggers here use the RSS feed not the Lj feed. However I do place a cut after the first picture on Friday which is usually clothed, but the cut doesn’t work with the feed for some reason. Maybe if you could explain to Christian how you get just a summary of your posts onto the feed he might be able to figure it out.
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Fridays are the only days when there are pictures of almost nude men (never fully nude) – the actual site pictures don’t show up on the feed (I just checked) – only the book covers and any pictures that accompany a post. I did talk to someone about this before and explained the reason why the “cut” didn’t work with feeds (Christian told me why but it was a long time ago and I’ve forgotten).
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Storm is coming down. *g* I love her but she has to go because everyone hates her.:(
For Christian: The summary setting in on the dashboard under “settings” – on the “Reading” option. The third one down says:
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For each article in a feed, show
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Full text or
Summary
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with radio buttons.
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As to the having to use dashes or asterisks in comments – damn – that’s a pain, isn’t it? I wonder why it does that? It doesn’t do that on any of my wordpress blogs, and I don’t know why!
Hi Erastes
I changed the setting. With blogger it was either/ or while with WordPress you can opt to read the full post.
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Re the asterisks – it’s probably due to the type of comment widget we’re using. We tried a number of them and this is the only one so far that gives the readers the kind of options they were looking for. Which one are you using? Maybe Christian would like to have a look at it.
Excellent – the feed view is much better, and much safer for those at work! Thanks Wave and Christian.
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I’ve had a look to see if i can work out which comment widget I’m using, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of it!
Aw, I don’t hate Storm, she’s great. I just couldn’t figure out why she was there. But who needs a reason? 😀
I like the way it is, content wise, the mix between books and other stuff. But the main thing for me are the books. I have most publishers bookmarked but even then you can’t see all there is. And even then it is nice to get the view from other on particular books. (IE I would never have bought Facade!!).
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As a dutchy I just love the free stuff. So I try to be good friends with Randy.
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The guest blogs are nice, because they are from the authors we read and they have interesting topics. For me the review postings are about the books not a way to talk about specific topics.
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I have to agree with Erastes and JFM that the side bar is a bit busy.
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As someone who reads this blog at work, or at least tries to, I still don’t mind the pictures. I am not supposed to read it at work anyway so they are very compelling reason to close the site. Also when reading it mobile style you don’t have the side bars. So less pictures.
I love the new site, but I do have a request regarding the reviews. Is it possible to get a one sentence description of the book before the jump link? The genres listed by the publishers tend to be vague (contempoary M/M or paranormal M/M). I’d like to see something a little more useful such a “serial killer mystery” or “football sports drama” or “The second book in the detective XY series.”
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I’ll be honest, I don’t have time to read every review every day, so I’ve noticed that I only click on the ones from authors I know or if the rating is particularly good (5 or Dik) or particularly bad (yeah… I got a little schadenfreude in me – I’m not proud of it). But I might click through on more of them if I knew the book focused on a subject I like.
Diane
I’ll have to ask the reviewers if they can add a one liner to their reviews. These reviews go out to the publishers who use them for their websites so we have to include whether the book is contemporary or paranormal but I’ll see if we can add a few more words to that.
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So you like to read the “trainwreck” reviews do you? *g*
In terms of content, I like the site the way it is – reviews & guest blogs, funny posts and serious topics make a nice mix.
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I agree about the side bar – that was the first thing that came to my mind. Sometimes I’m looking for some older posts to see if you’ve reviewed the particular book I want to read and I have trouble with tags, so I’m mainly using the authors’ names.
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As for X-Men universe, shirtless Hugh Jackman would fit nicely into the concept of this site, don’t you think? XD
Wave, I think the site looks good and is evolving fast, week by week it seems, to bigger and better things. The gay movie reviews and Tam as roving reporter are going turn out to be especially popular, I think.
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I like the suggestion from Diane NYC about a one-line info tag before the cut that specifies more about the genre.
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As for Storm, I think that Halle Berry is gorgeous. Are visitors really that disturbed to see her photo here? Maybe it’s a context thing like Lady M is alluding to — they want to see a hot man like Hugh Jackman on an m/m site. Or maybe it’s the gray hair that people are freaking out over. People can get so weird about hair! 🙂 Maybe they’d prefer a photo of Halle as Catwoman, not Storm, ha, ha!
Val
I love Storm but apparently not everyone does, at least not on this site, so she has to go.:)
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I’ll ask the guest reviewers if they wouldn’t mind including a few more descriptive words about what the story is about, before the “cut.”
I have gray hair. It’s cool. I don’t mind Storm, I figure she’s Wave’s alter-ego. 🙂
It’s difficult to submit material in plain-text format. Don’t know if it’s possible for Christian to change that or not.
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The edit box, for me anyway, is extremely frustrating to use. I can’t seem to scroll down and keep it at the point to which I’ve scrolled; it keeps jumping back up to the first paragraph, making corrections to subsequent paragraphs nearly impossible.
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Not having the handy-dandy editing bar above the Comments box (like at Dear Author, for example) can be a pain. It isn’t even possible to add italics in standard HTML code. I don’t understand the nature of these issues, just that they ARE issues. (See? Using caps for emphasis makes me feel as if I’m shouting at people!)
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One more suggestion and then I’ll get off your back. 😉 I sometimes get the feeling there are too many posts in one day. New material tends to get buried beneath other posts or bumped off the home page pretty quickly. I just know I’ve missed quite a few interesting features because of this.
Hi K.Z.
Submitting posts in plain text is not Christian’s requirement. Microsoft Word crashed my old blog at least twice because there is a lot of destructive code in the program and Blogger won’t accept it (I guess the code builds up and because I had so many posts it became overloaded). I was requested by Blogger Help to stop using Word and use a plain text program instead.
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When we moved here I was told (probably by Christian) that WordPress, which is what we use for posting, had similar problems with Ms. Word. Since I don’t want to crash this site ever I’m asking everyone to use Notepad. I admit it’s frustrating but until I can find a solution I can’t risk crashing the site.
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Re number of posts – There are many posts, some days more than others, however they are very easy to find. Recent Posts holds about 2+ days worth of posts. If you need to find any post older than that timeframe the Archives for each month has all of the posts, and it’s fairly easy to scroll through it to find something that interests you.
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Re the “comments” feature, I agree that some of what you mentioned e.g. the fact that the text automatically goes back to the beginning of the comment when in the editing mode, is frustrating. I don’t know how much, if anything Christian can do to resolve this issue. We had a lot of trouble with the comments feature before and this is a hybrid which has most of the features that other bloggers had requested. Anyway he’ll be reading the comments at some point and will let me know what is possible.
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Italics is a big problem, not only for the comments but for all the posts. Lynn gave me the html code for italics sometime ago but it’s too long for me to do it in a post considering the number of times I would need to type it. We all decided to use bold in place of italics since that was a lot easier (not as pretty, but efficient)
Wave, I really like the free books! A big part of why I try to visit everyday. But I like reading the reviews and comments too. Friday guys are cool. I like my men muscular and hairy and naked, but I understand why there are clothed.
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I really like the football guy with the sweaty half t-shirt and holding his shoulder pads. WOOF!
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I hate asterisks.
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Yes, replace Storm with Hugh.
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The flashing bookcovers of upcoming or recently released stories is kind of distracting. Ok, very distracting, when I’m reading reviews.
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What’s this about gay porn video reviews? Cool.
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I’m glad you are limiting the reviews to m/m. It could easily get cluttered up with other genres.
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JOHN
John
Glad you like some of the features like the free books and some of the hunks *g*
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If you hate asterisks there is an html code for paragraphs or you can do without paragraphs altogether. Here’s the code which I’ll put in parenthesis so that it actually shows up, I hope Let’s hope this works. If not I can email it to you. Asterisks are just easier! OK it didn’t work.
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I asked about the amount of work involved in a forum and what were the options. Tam suggested that you might want to check out Goodreads which has a number of romance and other forums and apparently there are lively discussions. I don’t belong to Goodreads – too much additional time needed, which is in very short supply – so I can’t tell you how effective their forums are. Additionally, for each forum there needs to be someone who monitors the discussions. Since we don’t have the resources to do so here (we all have regular day jobs in addition to everything else we do) the best I can offer here is the discussions on each review post where we sometimes get into wide ranging topics and make book suggestions).
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I don’t believe that M.L. Rhodes is going to review gay porn. I think she’ll be reviewing gay movies which is a completely different thing.:)
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Sorry but the authors like the carousels with all of their new and upcoming books. However, you can pause the carousel simply by pressing the “pause” button (if you place your cursor directly above a cover, at the very bottom of the picture, you will see the “pause” button.) Hope that helps.
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Storm is going.:)
I love the new site and things that I might have suggested have either been added, or I just finally noticed them. Like I couldn’t figure out what DIK stood for for the longest time. I was previously trying to find just the 5 star rated reads….but had to first find a 5 star rated book, then use the tags. Now those are both easy to find right on the sidebar! Which is great. Of course, it could have been there all along and it just took me awhile to find it.
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The cut on LJ, that changed for me a few days ago. I used to see the entire post, which I liked, but now I get a paragraph or so in and see this instead. […] I use a work filter to save the racier stuff till I get home but the near nakedness on this site is okay for my worksite. If something is a little sexier than normal, I scroll faster. But I know that not everyone’s work can be so laid back. Without feeling a need to get into a massive debate over work filters, I don’t mind having to click in the […] to get to the goods.
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Also, I love the new ‘notify me’ feature…email notifications keep me sane.
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I guess the thing that still really confuses me is the need for the *. But once I figured that out, it wasn’t a problem.
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What would be really useful for people like me who are new to the site is a quick faq page. Something that explains how to get paragraph breaks, and some of the more used shorthand. They seem to be very site specific as the few times I’ve looked stuff up in urban dictionary didn’t help. I think the other name that confused me was speculative fiction. But I tracked that down pretty easily.
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Overall, I think the site is great….and I don’t mind Storm. 😛
Wren
Re the “cut” or filter, I recently changed it so that only a small portion of the post is visible so that bloggers have to click on the post if they want to read the rest of it. Hopefully this will resolve work related problems vis a vis viewing of the site while at work.
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Per your suggestion, Tam is helping to put together a FAQ on the site (common terms, how to find your way around the site, etc.) We listen and respond wherever possible.
Feedback about what I really like:
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I like the review by rating and review by author sections along the side. It’s very convinient.
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I like the coming soon section
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Of course I like the “free books” posts.
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I like the community here, everbody is very friendly.
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Feedback about wishes. (What I’d hope for in the future):
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I’d love a forums sections were we can talk about what we are reading, what we are interested in reading and would like to see if others have read it, some place where we can talk further about thinsg we like and hate in books.
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I wish there was a way to tag a book for later reference. Maybe create a user bookshelf or wishlist we could consult later when shopping.
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It’s been mentioned, but I wish we could format our posts better.*
I love your site, Wave, and don’t have any complaints, but I agree with Erastes about the Friday Men, because I get the LJ feed, and sometimes have to scroll down really quickly. Remember the time when my other half did catch a glimpse and wanted to know what we did with our man once we’d chosen him? Luckily I don’t think he saw too much exposed flesh that time. 😀
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Keep up the good work! This is one of my all time favourite places to visit.
Gaye
Nice to see you again.
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I just modified the feed so that you only get the first three lines of each post. You’ll have to click on the button to get the rest. Hope that helps.
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Geoffrey Knight (the Aussie author you talked about) is going to be interviewed November 11. I really hope you’ll stop by. He’s very funny as well as cheeky.
I’m definitely looking forward to reading your interview with Geoffrey. I’ll be sure to read his book before you post, so that I’ll have some inkling about the way his brain works. ;D
Re: discussion forums…the M/M Romance group on Goodreads is a lot of fun. It is a closed group, so people need to send a note to the moderator to join (in order to keep underage kids out, the discussions can get really raunchy:) It has only been around for 4 months but has about 300 members so far, dozens of discussion threads, various activities (including a book of the month read) and a bookshelf cataloging over 800 m/m titles.
Overall, I love the site. I agree about the sidebar busy-ness. The multiple blog lists confuse me – blogroll, cool blogs, author blogs…is there any way to combine them or put all authors in one and the rest in another list?
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I love reading the posts by guest columnists. Love the reviews of course. The site’s been loading faster for me lately so that is good, too.
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I have to commend you, Wave, on establishing a site where people can write whatever is on their mind and the place still stays safe and welcoming.
Kudos!
Wren
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Thanks for commenting.
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I try to moderate the discussions so that they don’t get too heated, especially on the various posts re hot topics. A recent example was the Lambda decision not to include straight authors in their awards and the various posts, pro and con. Also my post a couple of days ago stressing that this site only reviews M/M books is another example. I suppose it did not sit well with some authors who write “M/M” books that have sex between the protagonists and female partners – sometimes a quarter or even a third of the book has M/F sex. So, yes, I try to keep things in perspective.
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I will be combining the different lists (2 of them anyway) within the next month. My problem is one of time but I’ll make the time.
Lots of good comments here.
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One feature I like that I have seen at many other blogs is that they can show you which comments are “new” since you last read the comments. I find this particularly helpful in threads that get a lot of comments (like this one).
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On the home page, the left hand column (the one with the posts and reviews) is shorter than the two right hand columns. I feel like that is some valuable real estate that should be used — that might also address the issue of having new and recent posts go off the home page so quickly — using that space would give a space to keep another post or two on the home page before they move to the “recent” area.
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Great comment Leslie about the number of posts on the home page. I think that can be easily solved and is simply a matter of the number of posts specified by Christopher.
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In terms of the “comments” feature, I know that after 50 comments the system starts a new thread but maybe it needs to be refined even further. It’s amazing that the majority of the comments here relate to the “comment” feature.:)
For those who have issues with the pictures at work, you can use this bookmarklet which will “zap” the pictures in a post. I tried it here and the only pictures it leaves are the carousels with the new and coming books. But all other pictures magically disappear leaving only text.
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Anyway, just follow the instructions and drag the bookmarklet “zap images” up into the too bar and when you come to the site quickly click on it and voila, no more pics to freak out your coworkers. 🙂 Of course it makes the Friday guys a lot less fun as you are choosing blind, but that could be a fun game too. Wait until you get home to see what you got.
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https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
Great suggestion Tam on how to look at porn at work without anyone noticing.*g*
I don’t have any useful feedback about the editorial content, but the page itself is so stuffed with activities, it looks like a Rube Goldberg alarm clock. There are links, polls, a radio, a chat place, an animated list of national flags, and several things I’m still trying to identify. My favourite is the world map with slightly ominous bull’s-eyes flashing over certain regions — currently, over Poland and somewhere around Montreal. I’m sure it’s not as sinister as it looks.
Batboy
The map is flashing over your house. How do you think I know where you live? *g*
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Christian and I are going to be doing some moving and we’re asking for your help with the moving boxes. Gird your loins!
I’m way late to the game here because I’ve been on vacation – and I guess I’m in the minority, but I hate the new RSS feed settings. I loved the fact that I didn’t have to click out of google reader to read an entire post. I am simply less likely to read something if I have to click out of my reader to do so, because I read a ton of feeds – my google reader is jam packed – and it takes a lot more time to click out, switch windows/tabs/whatever, than it does to just skim down my feed reader. This is especially true because your site still takes a long time to load, though less than the old one.
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So I had *loved* the fact that I could read entire reviews in my feed reader. And sadly, I’m finding myself, without even intending to, reading a lot fewer full Jessewave posts now – not bothering to click through to things I enjoyed before that aren’t reviews, and reading fewer reviews that aren’t 4 or above – simply because of time constraint (I was backed up about 60 posts after vacation, so I had a chance to observe my new behavior!).
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I suppose there’s no way for me to customize this myself, is there? It’s a site-wide thing? Would it be possible for certain posts, like reviews, to be posted in full, while NSFW posts, like Friday guys, aren’t? Or is that just too much hassle?
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No one else appears to have complained, but I’m very sad about this…
Hi Justacat
I got so much grief from everyone because they didn’t want the entire post on the feeds that I changed it. However, I’ll ask Christian if there’s a way around it for you. I suspect not. I don’t know what feed you use but with RSS you can click on the arrow on the right of the post and it takes you to the post on the site. When you finish reading the post just click on the “back” arrow which takes you back to the feed. Is this the step that you don’t want to do?
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I’ll ask Christian if you can customise your own feed and have him post something here.
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I suppose because a lot of the bloggers are reading the posts at work they don’t want some of the pictures to show.
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I was not aware that the site was taking some time to load since we have made a number of changes to improve loading times. This is the first complaint that I have received recently about this, and again I’ll ask Christian how we’re doing in this area.
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Thanks Justacat for commenting.
I’m with Justacat. I see from your response Jesse that it was changed due to complaints. I know you can’t please everyone; it’s hard. But just in case this would be a poll question or just for edification, when sites don’t put up the full post on reader, I rarely if ever click on them to go to the site and read the whole thing.
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The convenience of reader for me is being able to scan through lots of posts from different sites in one sitting by NOT having to go to every single site to see what’s been posted. So the convenience factor that is Reader is already gone if you only have the first few lines of a post that don’t really even give me an idea of what it’s about many times.
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I’m not complaining; it’s my problem. Just letting you know that as a blog reader in general, I rarely bother going into sites anymore that do that. I have too many blogs and sites that I like to visit and having to click on each site to read a post doesn’t work for me anymore.
MB (Leah)
I wondered why I didn’t see you anymore on the site commenting.
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I’m wondering if there is a way to do this so that for one reader the whole post shows and for the other one only 3 lines would show. I just sent Christian an email and I don’t know what his thinking is. He’ll usually post something here. There’s got to be a way around this surely with all the technology “fixes”.
Hi Justacat and MB
Sadly Jesse is right. WordPress only offers either the full text feed or the description feed. I searched the WordPress documentation, but there doesn’t seem to be a way around this.
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As an alternative I can recommend visiting the mobile version of the site with a normal browser. This is how I visit the site myself most of the times.
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http://mobile.gayromance.org
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You can surf the site very fast and in a way similar to that in a feed reader. And you can even leave comments that way!
Justacat and MB(Leah)
Please let me know if Christian’s solution is workable for you.
I’ll take a look at that possibility – but once again, it means going to a separate page rather than using the convenience of a feed reader to consolidate all the many, many blogs I read. I love this site, so I try to make the effort, but the fact is that my RSS reader page (I use google reader) is always open in my browser and I go to it many times a day, whereas any other single page just isn’t going to get nearly as much of my attention. I try to make the effort click through – but whereas before, I’d scan through *every* post, no matter whether I thought it would interest me or not, and sometimes thereby found myself caught up in things I might not otherwise have discovered (e.g., an interview of an author I don’t know, or a discussion of an issue I didn’t think I cared about), with things set up this way I rarely click through on posts that I’m not interested in to begin with.
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As Leah says, this is my problem, not yours. But the fact that she feels the same does make me wonder…this particular post to which we’re commenting was aimed at feedback in general, not at this issue in particular. I wonder whether there are others who feel as we do who aren’t commenting here? Indeed, it’s people who are not clicking through as much anymore who are most likely *not* to have paid much attention to this post or to have commented. It’s only serendipity that I did; I was going through a week’s worth of posts at one time, feeling very unhappy about the change, and looking specifically for one to which I could comment about it, so when I saw this post I clicked through though I normally would not have.
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I know you want to make as many people as possible happy, and it’s always the case that not everyone is going to be happy, and it may be that the NSFW people clearly predominate, but I’m wondering whether comments to a general feedback post give you truly accurate information about that. Because this is an issue of readership of the blog, which is obviously very important to you, might it be worth devoting a post/poll specifically to this issue (with the first three lines making it clear what the issue is *g*), to get a better idea what the division of opinions among your readership really is?
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Or of course it may be that you’re happy with this solution and don’t feel the need for dwelling on it further!
“Indeed, it’s people who are not clicking through as much anymore who are most likely *not* to have paid much attention to this post or to have commented.”
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Actually, I still get the comments in full feed and read yours Justacat, which caught my eye. I actually didn’t really notice the original post.
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This is how I do it now on some sites that don’t do full feeds. Comments are still usually on full feed and I read them. That’s how I get an idea if I want to jump in or not or if it’s an interesting post.