The way you’ve moved the sidebar, by having it earlier in the source code, may be a problem for anyone reading the site on a mobile device - they’ll have to scroll through the entire sidebar text (possibly including the entire idle player list, if the browser doesn’t support Javascript) before they can see what the most recent blog entry is.

The thing about the header is just that there’s an awful lot of whitespace above the “fold”, particularly for the larger header images. Maybe it’s time to start from a new theme? Should we put it to an (informal) vote?

I changed that back, kevan.  or at least i think I did.  It should just now be floated left instead of right.

If that’s not the case, then i’ll have a look.

One thing that could save some screen real estate is just making the header less /tall/, as well.

I would oppose starting from a new theme.  This one has had a lot of work put into it, and yes, has suffered ‘code decay’.  But getting back up to snuff will probably be less work than starting over.

Ah, okay, that’s better.

My only aesthetic objection is that the blog content looks a bit detached and uneven with all the hovering whitespace, so I’ve added a dotted line to the side of the sidebar.

Would we actually lose much work by replacing the theme? I’m assuming that the only important BlogNomic stuff is the content of the sidebar template, which we can just drop back into the sidebar(s) of whichever predesigned template we ended up using.

I’d prefer the sidebar back on the right; it’s really hard to click on the comment box now, because it’s towards the middle of the window rather than the edges, and harder to read the blog posts too now in their new position. As for the header, I prefer it to be separate from the sidebar, strangely for screen real estate reasons. It’s trivial to simply scroll down a bit so that the header is no longer in the way; if the sidebar went beside it, it would no longer be possible to do that without losing the sidebar features.

Kevan: the comments were also hacked on a bit to get the voting to work right: As you know they’re just smilies.

What i wish we had was a smoother way to post.

Ais: i’m not sure why the comment box is so small, to be honest.

I strongly disagree that it’s harder to read the posts, though—it’s a used-to thing, mostly.

Is that even part of a template? The only serious template hacking I can see is the sidebar, and the blog-entry title prefix in “posts”.

What do you mean by a “smoother way to post”?

Without all the nonsense with the guts of EE.  something like the Comment box, but for a new post. 

Yeah, it’s part of the ‘archive’ template, I believe.

I have a question.

Will Google Wave have functionality that could potentially be useful to BlogNomic?

(btw, yes, a more straightforward posting box would be a godsend.)

I would definatelyy prefer the sidebar on the right, but also up with the header like Kev suggested.

Sidebar belongs on the right.  Kevan is correct—if you read the site on a Blackberry, you would have to read the entire sidebar first.

I have a small question, if you could help… is there a way to set a variable to count the total number of open proposals so that I could have the “Pending Proposals” read “Pending Proposals (# of open proposals)”?

Wak: the short answer is yes.  Unfortunately, the long answer is “I don’t remember how”.

Josh: I don’t know.  I will investimagate.

Wak, edit comment: Hunh. We used to change it every dynasty or two, just because it’s one of the easiest ways of changing the ‘look’.  But, life goes on.

[Spike] It should just depend on the order the text appears in the source, not the order it appears left-to-right on the screen. Excalabur had fixed it so that the sidebar appeared left on the screen but later in the source.

[Wakukee] There’s a “{total_results}” ExpressionEngine variable you can access; I’ve hacked a solution where it just goes through the proposal loop twice to get it (so that it can print the title before it has to start printing proposals). This might be adding unnecessarily to page render time, and I started working on a quicker alternative (that generates all the HTML in a variable and prints it at the end), but don’t really have the time to debug it at the moment.

Oddly, making a temporary template to test this kind of thing without wrecking the live site doesn’t work - it doesn’t seem to want to process the PHP, when I preview it. What am I overlooking?

Wow. Giant comment box. 

Perhaps we should change the veto icon to a version of the purple arrow, but pointing downwards.

...is that not what Ex JUST did in this post?

Arthexis probably still had the old one cached. Shift-reload the page if you’re still getting the grey globe thing.

Arth was being sarcastic…