Some graphical re-design

[administrator]

You might have noticed some colourful banners at the top of category pages. I’ve added these to give a reminder of people about the category they’re in and also to encourage people to post in the most appropriate category. I’m still seeing quite a lot of people posting in Chatter when their posts really should be elsewhere. I’ll modify the banner text to help explain what goes where and how to find the right place the category you’re in isn’t the best one.

I’m also adding some some icons next to the coloured category blocks. This doesn’t add any functionality. I just think it looks a bit nicer! Once I’ve got all the icons in place I’ll remove the colored blocks and just leave the icons.

[bitsostring]

I like the banners, but they could do with a bit more graphic design:

So line break after “works” (or “and”), no need for full point

AI can’t do it all

[administrator]

No AI involved. Just plain simple Ruby on Rails code. There are no parameters I can use to affect how it formats the text though.

It will also vary depending on the size of your screen and browser window. It probably needs some AI to make it behave nicely in all circumstances?

[bitsostring]

Reminds me of the bad old days of desktop publishing

Thank Goodness there’s no hyphenation involved. . .

(Nothing personal, you understand?)

[administrator]

Good idea about hyphenation. If I change the text to “and-how-to-use-it.” then it might split ok!

[bitsostring]

“works-and-how”. . .

Unless Ruby uses no-break hyphens

[administrator]

Now that the banners are in place and I can see what they look like I intend going through all the About text to make sure it’s consistent. The banner takes the first paragraph so I want to make all the first paragraphs about the same length. That should make them all look a bit better.

[administrator]

I’ve also added icons to a lot of the tags. It’s not complete, mostly because whilst I’ve got 1700 icons to choose from there aren’t any for ‘weather software’ or GFS, etc.

Now that we’ve had tags set up for a while I find them quite useful. If you select one, e.g. pws-dashboard, then you just get to see posts related to that tag, wherever they are in the forum. Try them if you haven’t done, you might like them.

If you can think of other tags that would be useful, let me know. I can set them up to be auto-assigned to most posts that are relevant.