Last Updated on October 18, 2016
As you may have noticed, the blog looks a bit different today. After several weeks of searching, I’ve decided to try a new theme to see if I can solve a few behind-the-scenes problems here at the blog.
If you really liked the old theme, then let me assure you: I did, too. In fact, I’ve spent more than six months looking for blog themes that I like even as much. Conventional wisdom would surely lead one to ask me why I’d change the theme if that were the case.
And that’s where those aforementioned behind-the-scenes problems come in. Recently, Livefyre, the comment system I’ve been using for some time now, released a significant upgrade: Livefyre 3.5. In my old theme, I was unable to use it. The old theme refused to cooperate with the new Livefyre. Specifically, it displayed everything correctly, but when you typed a comment, the post button didn’t work. You could press it until your fingers were as blue as the button itself, but nothing happened.
Livefyre looked into it briefly, but as they were tied up with other problems that more people were reporting, I apparently fell off their radar. It happens. Livefyre has, prior to this, been great to work with, and so I’m willing to cut them some slack. In any case, I was left to my own devices to come up with an alternative.
Livefyre wasn’t the only plugin or code that gave me problem in the old layout. The monthly calendar that you see in the sidebar would not work: the “Saturday” column always displayed outside of the sidebar. And plugins like tag or category clouds, which display a batch of titles in various font sizes, wouldn’t display properly, either: instead of displaying as a “cloud” in which more often-used terms appeared larger, they appeared one per line and all in the same font size, pretty much defeating the purpose of the cloud concept altogether.
That alternative might have been Disqus, an alternative commenting system that I used previously but shelved when it started having sync problems. At that time, their tech support essentially suggested that I should turn off all of my plugins and then reactivate them one by one until I find the conflict. This is tech support speak for “figure it out yourself.” But I was willing to give them another try, thinking that the new blog design might work better than the old one did for them as well.
I reached out to them and got one response. It prompted a few more questions, but after two days, they hadn’t responded. I sent multiple tweets to them asking for an email address. No response.
So went back to Plan A, and installed the upgraded Livefyre 3.5. Much to my pleasant surprise, it now appears to work. You can now add bold and italics font as well as live links by clicking the little pencil icon at the lower left of the Livefyre widget window. With the weekly Saturday Six and Sunday Seven, having this additional option might make life a lot easier. Livefyre also links Twitter mentions of URLs here and treats them as comments, promoting your Twitter account when you promote (or respond to) a post here via your Twitter feed. And of course, you can also leave a comment here without setting up a Livefyre account. That was an important feature that we didn’t have when Livefyre first launched, but as soon as it became available earlier this year, it became available here.
There are still some tweaks to be done, and I’ve reached out to the developer to assist with some minor cosmetic changes. One of them worth mentioning is font size: yes, I know the type is a bit smaller than you’re used to. It’s smaller than I’m used to as well. That’s one of the things we’re working on, and we’ll get it back to the “normal” 14-point size as soon as possible! So in the meantime, I hope you’ll forgive a few minor cosmetic issues until I can get those corrected.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think of the update!
I agree with Linda, you need a left margin
Requested feedback: @patricksplace Having text up against edge on left is uncomfortable. More in comments http://t.co/DhmfSm2x #blogchat
@LindaSherman Thanks, Linda…left a reply on the post and I’m checking with @Livefyre on the linkback issue!
Wow. My tweet shows up in the main comments section. That is a little bit creepy. I like the way Disqus breaks these out to “reactions”. And on my ItsDifferent4Girls version of livefyre – in a section called “Conversation From Twitter”. I have the latest version (at least there is no message to update) Version 3.17 and it’s “latest conversation” not “latest blog post” but perhaps that is a setting. In any case, looks like it may be flaking on mine too. http://itsdifferent4girls.com/2012/08/blog-buddies-google-plus-circle/
LindaSherman The older version of Livefyre also broke it out between comments and Twitter mentions (or something like that). I suppose this new version mixes them together. I don’t mind either way, but I think it is a bit nicer when they’re separated. I’ll ask Livefyre about this when they get back to me on the linkback issue.
Got this tweet from Livefyre:Â https://twitter.com/Livefyre/status/260235901228183553 “Hey Linda, nothing has changed, you just gotta be sure the blog owner has activated it and user has here: http://www.livefyre.com/profile/edit/sites/”
I checked there and none of my setting have changed since it was working. Also I have the latest update of Livefyre. So I don’t know why yours should be newer than mine.
LindaSherman That is interesting. I haven’t heard back from them, yet, but I checked the link you gave me and that box IS checked. Hopefully next time around it’ll work. If not, it has to be an issue for them in some way.
My “latest blog post” did not show up and it should because I have Livefyre on ItsDifferent4Girls.com Used to be called “latest conversation” so this must be part of the update?
Thanks for the heads up. I don’t like having the text butting up against the edge on the left.Â
Theme is from Denmark? iwebix.de (looking at webdesign link on the far left.)Â
I am on Chrome on a Mac. The experience may be different for others. See you on #blogchat!
LindaSherman Hmm…could you possibly send me a screengrab? I’m not seeing text up against the edge anywhere, and I’m also on Chrome on a Mac. Curious to see what that’s about.  As for the Latest Conversation, that’s VERY strange…I’ll reach out to them to see if there’s something wrong with that function.
Please DM me your email for me to send screen shot to. I don’t see a place on this commenting platform to add an image.
patricksplace LindaSherman I am seeing the text against the edge too, but maybe it’s intentional? Here is a screengrab, taken of Firefox 16 on Windows 8:http://mikasalakka.fi/img/pp-align.png
msalakka  Very interesting…I have padding on my screen, but I also have Helvetica/Arial as the typeface and it appears that you’re seeing Arial Narrow. Very weird. I have a new item to talk to the developer about! Thanks for letting me know.
msalakka  Thank you. Exactly. I get the same.
patricksplace This is odd.  At home I was viewing this blog on Chrome and running Windows 7 and I didn’t have this problem..  Here at work I have the same problem reported by Linda and Masalakka and I’m on Chrome running Windows 7 professional.
@patricksplace Like the layout and the color! Font size is okay for me, but I must be in the minority.
@MsMin Thanks for the feedback! Font’s definitely better since I changed from gray to black, but still smaller than I got used to! 🙂
@patricksplace Nice layout and design, Patrick #blogchat
@gingerconsult Thanks, Jen! I appreciate it!
I think switching themes is worth it, if it means being able to use Livefyre. It has really made it easy to comment and communicate on your blog.
I like the new design, but I have noticed a couple of things I’d like to mention, although I understand you’re still working out the new theme kinks.
The page load time has increased considerably. It takes between seven and fourteen seconds for me for a page to load. It is not a connection problem because the header of the page loads in a couple of seconds (I can see the title of the page change), but one of the plugins is delaying the processing of the page itself quite a bit.
And this is probably a Livefyre-specific issue, but I can’t use quotations in the comment field. As soon as I try to punch in a quote mark by pressing Shift-2, it presents a drop-down menu of social media contacts for an easy & quick @insert. The normal way to insert an AT sign on my keyboard is AltGr-2, but using that combo I can produce the @ sign without any drop-down menu appearing, so it would seem it’s a key shortcut specific to Shift-2 and not to, say, the @ sign itself.
msalakka Hi, Mika…thanks for the feedback. Wow, I’m not seeing that delay at all here, but I will try a few ideas…I suspect I know which one might be causing the biggest delay and I’ll try adjusting it. Let me know if you see an improvement later today.
As for the quote button, the Shift-2 is traditionally the “at” symbol, and in Livefyre, it’s assumed that if you want to respond or reply to someone specifically, the @ sign is how you’ll do it. On my keyboard, the quotes have their own button, two keys to the left of the L. Give that one a try and see if that produces the quote symbol for you.
Thanks again for letting me know about the page load time…that’s very disturbing!
patricksplace msalakka The delay is shorter by a couple of seconds. It takes now about 5 seconds to load a page. If you’re not seeing it at your end then it may be something at mine, although other sites (FB, etc) load instantaneously. I will keep an eye on it.
The Finnish keyboard layout is a bit different due to the three extra keys representing the so-called Scandinavian letters (Ã¥, ä, and ö). On both my PC keyboard and my iMac’s keyboard the quotes can only be produced with Shift-2. Strangely enough, AltGr-M also produces the µ sign, in case I want to measure things in micrometres. Where is the happy/unhappy smiley key? At any rate, hardly a game breaker.
I’m feeling a bit disoriented but I’m sure that’s temporary until I get used to it. Â My only issue is the “Related Posts” section that appears between the post and the comment box. Â It took me a while to find where to comment and when I’m typing here, I can’t look up and refer to the post without scrolling as it is too far up the page.
I didn’t have the page load time problem msalakka did – or just didn’t notice it.
One other thing, the Upcoming Posts section in the sidebar tells me to click the Facebook icon “above” Â but I don’t see the icon. Â I wonder if you switched how things appear in the side bar and it is now “below” this section as I do see a Facebook box down the sidebar a bit more.
Cathryn (aka Strange) I took out one element that was there when Mika tried to access the site: essentially, it was a display of follower counts for the blog’s Facebook page and my Twitter account…not the most important things in the world and apparently they took too long to get the latest counts.
Great point on the Related Posts location. I’ll work on that later today…I haven’t found the simple “on/off” switch for that one, yet! 🙂 Thanks for the feedback!