Regarding the very important matter of chapter labels:
Are you sure you’re happy with the of the spelling of “Openey Bit”?
I can think of many alternate spellings that make more sense to me for this made up word.
Openy, Openny, or Open-y all seem more reasonable.
Well, that’s not a web site issue at least. Rym is free to write any text whatsoever in the chapter titles.
Is this supposed to be something? It looks like you accidentally the content:
https://frontrowcrew.com/tags/videogame/
Edit: now I see what’s going on. The episodes are actually listed, just in a weird way. It’s not obvious what’s being shown with TAGS TAGS TAGS all over the place.
It’s because the backend for that page is coded, but the HTML template isn’t done yet. It’s just the placeholder template.
Some things I’ve bumped on:
https://frontrowcrew.com/geeknights/, there’s no obvious permalink to click on the jumbo sized first episode. After fiddling around, I figured out you can click on the episode title, but it doesn’t look like a link.On episode list pages, eg https://frontrowcrew.com/geeknights/?q=&page=2:
On individual episode pages eg. https://frontrowcrew.com/monday/20230925/search-engines-suck-now/:
DOWNLOAD MP3 button and See Forum Discussion looks a little weird.DOWNLOAD MP3 button is reverse of all the other buttons on the siteDOWNLOAD MP3 on mobile highlights the text, instead of bringing up the link-context-menuFeels like there’s extraneous text around. Episode entries in the RSS feed have a section that goes like
Related Links
Forum Thread
- Episode title <the actual link to the forum>
Discord Chat
- Episode title <the actual link to discord>
Things of the Day
[...]
Ditch the line “Related Links” and condense Forum Thread/Discord Chat to one line each?
<a href="link to the forum">Forum Thread</a>
<a href="link to the discord">Discord Chat</a>
The title on https://frontrowcrew.com is “Homepage”?
Something weird happened in the RSS entry for the Cobalt Core episode - another copy of all the text got inserted without formatting?
The book club page for Time War is missing links to the actual content.
I recently watched Silo on AppleTV and once I realized it was based on Wool I went to find the book club episode. But it looks like the some (many?) of the book club episodes do not point to the right threads in the forum.
For example:
Wool | Book Club | frontrowcrew.com links to Book Club - Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - Front Row Crew Forum but should link to GeekNights Book Club - Wool - Front Row Crew Forum
I wondered if this was just for book club episodes linking to the old forum, but I randomly tried an episode that links to the new community:
Pages of Pain | Book Club | frontrowcrew.com links to Book Club - Binti by Nnedi Okorafor - #2 by SkeleRym instead of Book Club - Pages of Pain by Troy Denning
It’s hard to even critique the design and layout of the new geeknights website, as it is so wrong and unusable in so many ways. Specific points of design are hard to reach when clicking on a link to change page is a stressful endeavour, when on every other website it’s a simple, unthinking action.
As in, at the top of the website there are two words “Shows” and “Community”. They look like links, and even display as underlined text when mouse hovering. THEY ARE NOT LINKS. Clicking on them takes you nowhere. Instead they open a dropdown menu of other links. BUT THEY DO NOT LOOK LIKE DROPDOWN MENU BUTTONS.
Dropdown menu buttons have a symbol: ▼
The text should be displayed like this:
Shows ▼ - Community ▼
That’s it! It would solve it! Two extra display characters! Very basic web design idea that communicates perfectly and removes all confusion!
But the website is FULL of examples like this. I’m sure Scott will have many excuses why the website is like it is, but it honestly looks like it’s designed by someone who just doesn’t use the internet on a daily basis, and I thought Scott was a professional at this kind of thing. Maybe programmers make the worst designers.
I assume you’re using the desktop version. Yes that one looks worse and has that odd functionality.
The mobile one is slightly better
How many hits on the site per day though? All I heard Scott say on the podcast was about making it work, very little on making it pretty.
Luke was going to complain even if we made a https://godly.website/. And he’s just one person with a weird use case that nobody else in the entire world has. I’m not going to spend hours of work catering to one individual person.
The web site does have many problems, but it’s still very much a work in progress. I went live with it not because it was done, but because it was at a state where it was an improvement over the old web site. Most importantly, unlike the old web site, this one has a modern and up-to-date code base and CI/CD stack. So working on it and updating it is very easy to do. The old web site was so old, just getting a working development environment was a nightmare.
Nobody is paying me to work on it, and I have a life, so progress is going to be slow. I mean, it took several years to reach this point, so that’s about the speed we are moving. If anyone out there is really so bothered by it, it’s entirely open source. Nothing is stopping anyone from sending me some pull requests. And if I don’t accept your pull requests, nothing is stopping anyone from taking the code and making their own GeekNights web site at another domain.
Are you going to expose the DB? Excluding the sensitive stuff of course.
- TotDs don’t appear in the site search. I was looking for bricksmash just now, but even exact match on a straight-text title don’t show up. For example, “Friendship is Manly” (with or without quotes) doesn’t turn up any hits, it was a thing on 20131106.
- If you’re on the search results page, the current search should show up in the search box. So you don’t have to re-type the whole thing again if you want to change it.
- Some mp3s are loaded on http, not https - for example
Re-upping these - looking for an old TotD is effectively impossible between all the clicking and scrolling you have to do. Luckily querying the DB dump works.
Ah yes, Luke is going to have a weird use case that nobody else in the entire world has. For example… (checks notes) … clicking on a link.
To illustrate a frustration of mine, and a frustration of Starfox (which literally proves you wrong that I’m the only person who wants to click on a link on the website):
This layout and hard-to-find links is like a cruel joke.
And the excuse of “I’m doing this for free in my spare time” is utter bullshit, and makes the whole project more frustrating.
In the time it took you to write your bullshit excuses, you could have made the title of all the episodes in this list into a link. If it’s so easy to work on the website and redeploy it with changes, prove it with your actions rather than fobbing off the feedback of your MOST INTERESTED USERS who want to ACTUALLY USE THE WEBSITE.
If I had done such a bad job of building a website, and fucked up the design so badly, I’d be ashamed to let anyone see it. I honestly find it hard to believe you’re a computer programming professional and yet you think this is good enough to let anyone see. It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you.
I’m not denying that there are issues like that which I also want to fix.
But you are being so nasty, and so mean, and really just an awful person. You’re actually making me not want to fix it just to punish you specifically for behaving like an entitled baby.
Why are you so angry, worked up, and impatient about the web site of an insignificant podcast? Why do you care more about it than even the people who make the podcast? Take a look in the mirror.
If you care about it so much, send me some pull requests. You can fix it yourself. We’ve already spent years working on it, and there are more years to spend. You’re really insulting the hard work of me and the other people put into getting rid of that older even shittier site. People who actually did work, and didn’t just complain.
The bug reports are filed. They’ll be fixed eventually. If you must have them fixed now, either do it yourself, hire someone to do it, or send me a check so I can hire someone to do it. Otherwise, it will wait until it becomes a higher priority in my life.
Sorry if it comes off as nasty! But the website itself, and your defense of it, is just so frustrating. It’s not that you can’t take criticism, it’s that you don’t even take feedback. Or even acknowledge that feedback is a possibility when releasing something in public.
Don’t you see that feedback is something we are giving because we care about your project, the podcast specifically and the website as a way to access it.
How do you think that telling me I care TOO MUCH means my feedback is less valuable?
If you think hiding behind “it’s an open source project, send pull requests” makes it more acceptable to have such a bad website design, then you’re completely mistaken.
Look, almost everything on the internet is made by people in their spare time, for no money. But there’s generally a level of quality that you expect someone to reach before showing it off, especially if they want someone to contribute to improving it!
This website is just so bad! It’s terrible to use and to look at!
The barest minimum anyone could ever ask for is that things that look like links be links! On a website!
Of course im annoyed by the website. I want to use and it’s garbage.
Pleading for pull requests isn’t going to help, because I don’t consider open source projects to be inherently better than closed source, and I hate open source being used as a shield against quality control, feedback or criticism.
I am taking the feedback. You’re just so impatient and insulting. It will be fixed when it’s fixed.
I’m not pleading for pull requests. I’m saying, if you want it fixed faster than the rate at which it is going to be fixed, that’s the only way it’s going to happen.
It’s known that the web site has issues. But if we waited for it to be perfect before launching it, we would still be using the old web site in 2030. Even this site is better than the old site, therefore, launching it was an upgrade.
If you find more issues just report them, without insulting our hard work, and then wait patiently.
Okay. But you see how it’s frustrating for all feedback to disappear into a void of zero acknowledgement, with the only response I get personally is insults and belittling from you?
Starfox pointed out some of these issues within a day or two of the website going live. Sure, you’re busy with life and this isn’t the highest priority, but it feels strange for almost two month to go by and nothing change at all.
Even so, I’ll throw another bug report into the stream.
Did you ever resize a website? Because I resize websites all the time, and maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but surely other people resize websites too, or adjust the size and shape of the window.
Here’s how the website looks when resizing, with a few other examples visible to show how the rest of the internet works:
Now I know you’re proud of the website, and you put in a lot of time already, and you plan on improving it for years to come. But did you ever press Cmd + or cmd - to check if the website was accessible friendly? Because I noticed this on my first visit, and didn’t think to mention it, because I thought the issue was so obvious. But now I’m not so sure.
I just read back through my comments in this thread, and they came out way harsher than I intended. Sorry for that.
- If you visit the RSS url in desktop Firefox, it downloads the file instead of showing it in your browser tab. I guess it’s technically incorrect, but I prefer seeing it in a browser tab. Simon Willison mentioned this recently:
There’s one extra trick here: I’m over-riding the default
content-typeheader and setting it to"application/xml; charset=utf-8.Django defaults to using
application/atom+xml; charset=utf-8which is correct… but causes most browsers to trigger a download rather than rendering the XML in the browser directly.
Feedburner just shows the xml: GeekNights
That’s Firefox being foolish. I fixed this with an add-on.
It’s really ridiculous because the functionality provided by this add-on is what used to be built into Firefox, and at some point they removed it.
So that one’s a WONTFIX? 
