RaceFans site development

New stuff: Sortable tables, front page Tweets and more

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 25 total)
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  • #132980

    Some new features have been added to the site today, here’s a quick run-down:

    Sortable tables

    Some tables on the site can now be sorted by you as you wish to make the data a bit more flexible and interactive. Click on a column to sort the data by it, or hold down shift and click on multiple columns to sort the data in more than one way.

    You’ll see more and more tables on the site making use of this – here’s four which are available already:

    Howe many races each driver started and finished
    Which drivers were eliminated in Q1, Q2 and Q3
    Penalties by driver
    Pit stops strategies by driver

    These tables can be distinguished from normal, un-sortable tables by the blue colouring on the top bar.

    Front page Tweet

    I often use Tweets to alert F1 Fanatic’s 50,000-plus followers to relevant content on the site that might not be immediately obvious from the homepage. The most recent Tweet now appears at the top of the homepage so those who aren’t following can also get the benefit of that.

    Search

    There’s an interim fix for the broken search field.

    Lessening homepage clutter

    Space on the homepage is at a premium on race weekends so old F1 Fanatic Live posts will now disappear when they are out of date. For those paying very close attention, this is why the total number of articles on the site appears to have just fallen by over 500.

    RSS

    Due to the persistent use of the RSS feed for copyright infringement and content theft, F1 Fanatic is now providing article summaries instead of full text via the feed.

    Mobile login

    Mobile users should now find a ‘log in’ button at the top of the site as had been requested.

    Other changes

    There have also been various CSS tweaks and fixes and some changes to the positioning of ads for mobile devices.

    #230989
    Retired
    Participant

    Great improvment mate. Nice we can now embed images and videos.

    #230990

    @jeff1s Thanks but that’s not new – it’s been around quite a while!

    #230991
    Alberto
    Participant

    Sad to see the full text RSS feed gone. This won’t stop people from coming to your website and stealing content… but may as well stop me from reading your posts. Most of my reading is done offline, during my commute, where I read articles downloaded via RSS. I guess that’s over now.

    #230992

    @hubbadubbadubba Of course I do not like to take features away from those using them legitimately but in this case the scope for abuse had become too great (the vast majority of content theft I’ve observed is occurring through RSS feed scraping) compared to the value of retaining it.

    It’s also worth noting that some content did not display correctly in the feed anyway: interactive graphs, for example.

    However I’m grateful for the feedback and would like to hear from anyone else in the same position. It may be possible to offer the ability to view articles offline some other way in future.

    #230993
    Roald
    Participant

    Just sharing my opinion, but the front page tweet looks like my browser messed up loading the website. It needs integration with the layout, maybe putting it in a coloured bar like the menu above it would make it look better.

    Question though, did you ever receive/read my e-mail regarding the use of the @ tags?

    #230994

    @Roald This is the second piece of feedback I’ve had which suggests the revised style sheet isn’t loading for everyone at the moment. I’m looking into it.

    #230995
    jh1806
    Participant

    One small suggestion re the sortable tables – it took me a while to realise they were sortable as the header cells don’t suggest they are clickable. Underlining the header text or having the cursor change on mouseover would be a nice hint.

    Have some free CSS :D

    .tablesorter th { text-decoration:underline; cursor:pointer; }

    #230996
    Cornflakes
    Participant

    As with @Roald the tweet looks like a messed up load on the homepage. I’m using Chrome but checked it on Firefox and it looked fine. So I guess it’s a problem relating to Chrome browsers.

    Also, as @jh1806 mentions, making it more obvious that tables are interactive will help more casual viewers of the site. Cheers

    #230997
    andae23
    Participant

    Not sure if it’s intentional, but the Tweet on the home page is not your latest Tweet.

    #230998
    Biggles209
    Participant

    I’m with the earlier comment regarding the RSS feed. I read offline a lot, and without this, I’ll probably stop using the site. There were a few issues (like the interactive graphs), but once you understood these it was easy to go back online later if the content was sufficiently interesting.

    #230999
    matt88
    Participant

    As a daily commuter and Kindle owner, the possibility to exploit services that automatically download RSS feeds on the ebook reader is unvaluable, and the F1 Fanatic round-up was among my regular morning reads. I’m sorry I won’t have this chance any more, but I understand that content robbers are far more than a worry nowadays.

    #231000
    Don Speekingleesh
    Participant

    I’ll desperately miss the full RSS feed. This site is my most read F1 site and first port of call in my feed reader, but if I can’t read the stories in the reader it’ll have to fall back in line with the other sites – where first to post a story gets read, and other sites only maybe if I think their take will be sufficiently different.
    While it’s not nice to see your content being infringed, is it actually costing you money? Would putting ads in the RSS feed possibly help, or making it supporters only?

    #231001
    Aish Heydrich
    Participant

    How about a “Go to Top” button in the bottom right corner, as we scroll down way down due to long articles and sometimes even 30 to 40 comments down along with replies they become full threads longer than in the forums, scrolling up can be a pain.

    #231002

    @don-speekingleesh The number one source of traffic (and therefore a significant source of revenue) to F1 Fanatic is Google. Content theft via RSS has had a measurable negative effect on that.

    Again, it’s useful to have feedback on whether anyone was taking advantage of the ability to read offline, so thanks @matt88 and @biggles209 for that.

    @aish Visitors on desktop browsers can just hit ‘home’ on their keyboards, though this could be considered for those on mobile devices.

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