| For that reason, and maybe battery life on mobile devices, I added a dark mode. I kind of based it on what Google does to some extent: https://material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html I also updated the header for mobile devices. It is now more condensed so that the main content appears closer to the top of the page. June 23rd update: It's not complete yet, but I have added what I have so far regarding my tutorial on enhancing messages with CSS: https://canetalk.com/css/ June 29th - Update 1: - You can now change the font size in the forum in the settings section: https://canetalk.com/settings/ I still have some adjustments to likely make to some pages for it to work right. - I haven't completed the CSS tutorial yet. I was working on other things. - I added a [code] option to menu boxes to add formatted text that preserves spaces and is monospace (each letter uses the same width). This is good for NOAA messages so that they maintain their formatting. You can do it simply using <pre></pre> tags, but I decided to make a nice one that had a border. - I no longer let the width of the forum extend all the way across the page. This makes reading text harder and is kind of frowned upon I guess. June 29th - Update 2: I have added a new setting on the settings page. You can now control the maximum width of message pages. This applies to message pages and message lists. Most other pages have a maximum width of 700 pixels. You can choose to have no maximum width, so that text will span the width of your screen, or choose a maximum fixed width between 700 and 1500 pixels. A smaller width allows you to not move your head as much from side to side on a desktop computer or laptop. If an image displayed in a message has a larger width that what you set, it will be scaled down to fit the maximum width you select. July 2nd: I have been updating the styling that formats text and the spacing between elements. I am trying to style the forum so that it works well on desktop and mobile devices. I am trying to improve accessibility by making it easier to read text. You can adjust text to be larger or smaller on the settings page. Due to changes in how the forum is styled in the testing I am doing, for the next several days the text size may toggle between being large or small regardless of your settings. July 27th: I have, for now, completed the new tutorials on adding HTML and CSS to messages: https://canetalk.com/html/ https://canetalk.com/css/ I know, they're too long, but oh well. I kept the simple HTML tutorial around too, linked from the top of the HTML tutorial page. I took the table section out of it since it was a little advanced. Questions? An example you think I can add? Let me know. July 31st: A small, yet very significant change, was made to the code that determines where line breaks should be placed in a message. Previously, when using HTML in your message, especially a table or list, when previewing your message the code was significantly altered in the message box. Also, automatically added line breaks may have been added where you didn't mean them to when using HTML tags. I finally decided to revisit how I handled this and I think I have written a better way that usually preserves the HTML in the message box when you preview your message and doesn't add line breaks where you don't expect. The more complex explanation is that line breaks will no longer be automatically added around block-level elements. If you see any issues related to line breaks being added, or not added, let me know. August 1st: I added the option "Automatically display social media content from links". It works like the other option next to it for images, not requiring you to have to enter the social media links into the text field after you click "Embed Video / Social Media", and then clicking the add button. It may not be perfect, and I will monitor it to see how well it does. If you have issues, let me know. Aside from writing the CSS a little bit better in the main file for the site, I'm pretty much done I think with the forum updates. I might organize that file further based on some new things I have learned. I have been learning about things and writing the code better. Once I get the code to a place I like it, which is about where I am, I am going to use what I learned on my site to redesign the main template of the site. Since Internet Explorer should no longer be used, I am not coding for it any longer. That opens up a lot of possibilities and makes things easier when coding. Once I do the new template for my site, I'll convert the few dozen main pages I have, other than the model and recon systems. Then, I'll work on redesigning those systems to work with the new mobile layout and rewrite various things, like switching the rest of the maps to ArcGIS from Google. But I wanted to learn how to write some better code first and adapt it first here. Then I'll spend a year or more doing the model and recon systems. Once I test a things a little more I might reply to this post letting people know about the updates being about done, bumping this to the top of the forum list. Also, Facebook posts can work again in social media embeds. I guess they were updating things when I checked a month or so ago. It now can be embedded again. August 2nd: - I tried to fix an issue that seemed to be occurring with ads being forced to load before social media posts do. - I switched every page from using an older "doctype" version to HTML5. Now that the code is written better, I can finally switch to the modern tag. That caused a few things I need to fix when it comes to the appearance of some things. August 10th: I continue to make updates. I have added some new features, like "Quote" and renamed "Code" to "Pre" under the message box. I am also editing some of the posts I made with those, and this one occasionally, to test editing a message, which is something administrators can do. I need to make sure editing works well with these features. I also added the ability to add an image with a caption. It has a specific format if you click "Image" under the message box you will see a new field, Image Caption, where you can caption an image. You can simply write something about your image within the message box, but this might be more helpful for accessibility reasons and search engines to know what the image is. August 13th - Final update for now: For now, I have completed the updates in the forum. I have begun work on redesigning my site based on what I learned from updating the forum. I will first switch to a new layout that I will apply to the simple pages on my tropical sites. (dozens of pages) That's the easiest part. Then, work on the model and recon systems, which will also involve changing some of the code of the systems. It will also involve applying the new layout. The entire process will likely take a few years. Most, if not all, of the updates to the model and recon systems will not become live until the completion of the updates I am making due to the considerable changes that will be made to the code. The current systems would break if I tried to apply newer updates. I will be trying to write it better, for eventual public release of the code, make it more efficient, make some of the file sizes smaller, and hopefully use less files. (I recently made a backup of my tropical website and there were 658,000 files and 79,000 folders for a total of 18.6 gigabytes of data.) I will make various updates to the forum if I find an issue or if I find a better way to do something based on what I learn redoing my site. If anyone has any issues that they find on the forum, or suggestions, let me know. August 19th - Some more updating While I completed the planned updates on August 13th, I have continued improving the CSS file for the website that styles all the pages. I learned a bit of a better technique to handle dark mode. The updates allowed me to now have dark mode appear automatically if your operating system has dark mode enabled. I will likely continue making some updates to that CSS file as I continue to work on the redesign for my site and learn how I can improve it here too. August 21st - Some more updating I finally made an update that I had thought about doing previously. The HTML of pages is now minified, meaning when the server sends it new lines and tabs are removed from the code. This is done to save a little bandwidth. If you were to view the source of a page, the code is now a single line. I also updated the CaneTalk favorite icon. It is now readable as "CT" on your browser tab. I also added some code that might make saving a link to CaneTalk on the home screen of your phone work better, with the new logo and the name "CaneTalk". I have also continued to make updates to the CSS file. As I continue to learn new things in preparation for redoing my site, I am making the changes here first. August 23rd - Some more updating The main change I made was to handle an error I can't really describe well. Basically, in the Chrome browser on a mobile device the text would sometimes appear larger than it should be allowed. This might be something called "font boosting". I fixed it so that it shouldn't happen unless someone increases the font size through accessibility settings in the browser. (Using: html { text-size-adjust: 100%; }) If they do that, it will make some text appear larger than other text. (some text will be increased in size more than other text, even if it was the same size originally, simply because there was no height or max-height defined I think) I could have made it so that someone could never use accessibility settings on a mobile device to make the text larger, but I didn't like that idea. (Using: * { max-height: 9999999px; }) Someone can still make the text larger using the settings page. I really am getting closer to being done with changes. That font issue on mobile was bugging me so I finally investigated. I don't know of any other issues at the moment, so back to working on using what I learned here on my site. |