by So you probably noticed that the site looks quite a bit different. Good job!
So what’s the deal? Well, next week Google is changing its algorithm to favor mobile-friendly sites and penalized non-mobile-friendly sites. Since BotD wasn’t mobile friendly, I didn’t want to get penalized, so I pushed the new template out early. It’s responsive, so it should look nicer on your phone and whatnot.
Also, you’ll notice there’s quite a bit more room for the comic now, so I’m going to be making them slightly bigger very soon.
That said, it’s not done yet, not by a long shot. You’ll likely see changes made as I continue to tweak, and if you find a bug, please let me know.
Testing out comments.
Testing replies.
Dave, I’m not sure I like these mobile changes at all, first of all the ads shouldn’t be overlapping each other on the screen, I think it’s due to an incorrectly specified frame or something.
Second, the font size change, while nice, is a bit word-wrap happy on the large page.
You definitely want to be doing some tweaking to the site! 😀
I mean, when viewed in a regular browser on a computer or non-mobile device.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff needs to be tweaked. I just didn’t want to get penalized, so I put up the work in progress now. It’s functional, but needs fixes. I’ll be updating it regularly.
Somehow, I don’t think Google would be too quick to penalize you, and it shouldn’t once you updated, anyway! In theory, Google should have a policy that prevents them from royally stuffing up their own customers. 😉
Aaaaand …. Is reply chaining broken again? Sheesh, you were doing so well if so!
Okay, reply chaining is still functional! 😀 At least that’s not a problem! 😉
It could be a little deeper though, as far as nested comments go. I kind of like being able to follow conversations properly. 😀
I usually only make it go a couple of layers deep because it can get hard to track, but maybe I’ll look at doing another layer or two.
Well, Google’s perspective on this is that non-responsive sites aren’t great user experiences for mobile users, so it’s just trying to serve up the best experience possible. They gave plenty of warning too. I just had other projects pulling me away from this one. Pushing this live is probably a good thing for me, because now I have to look at it more often and it’ll force me to keep working at it.
I dunno wtf Google are thinking, your site has been plenty responsive on my mobile smartphone for a while now. About the only thing you really need to worry about is whether a mobile device can do what a normal browser can do, and still keep it looking good on the screen. BotD was doing great so far! 😀
The site update will, however, allow you make mobile browsing easier, have you got a good mobile phone to test things with? That should really tell you what you want to know! 😉
Dave, you wanted to know what’s broken on mobiles right? Well here’s a big one: The BCN dropdown on my mobile device is broken because there isn’t any button to click on to make it go to the selected link.
Previously this was present on the mobile site that was presented to me.
Ah, good catch. I’m seeing the same thing. I’ll investigate.