IntenseDebate - Karen McGrane

10 years ago @ The Toast - Toast Points for the W... · 1 reply · +14 points

Also! Search is currently broken. We are trying to make it search author names (it doesn't by default) and in protest it has stopped searching at all. We are ON IT

10 years ago @ The Toast - Toast Points for the W... · 6 replies · +16 points

A little update from the redesign team, if you want to know what we’ve been up to, besides sending our moms all the nice things you’ve said about the redesign:

* Category and series pages will be up soon! (In fact they are already there if you’re the kind of person who goes around sniffing out pages from URL hierarchies.) They’re not fully styled yet or linked to the main page, but we’ll have that done soon-ish.
* You all liked the ads so much we added another ad slot right between the author bio and the comments. That's not hooked up yet so you will see a giant glob of whitespace, which we hope you will enjoy in the meantime.
* Logged in commenters are STILL seeing name/email/website fields, despite our best efforts to remove them. Ethan is fiddling with the knobs, when he is not delivering lengthy soliloquies on the subject of IntenseDislike, in GIF format.

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 0 replies · +2 points

Aww, thank you so much! I have a special file where I am keeping all the nice things that people say and your comment just went right into it. (I also have a special file where I keep mean things people say about me, it is called the trash.)

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 0 replies · +1 points

Thanks for catching the search problem. We are trying to make it search author names; apparently it has given up and stopped searching for anything. We’ll fix!

Also the fix for all category and series pages should be in soon.

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 0 replies · +1 points

I’m so sorry you are having these problems! Can you tell me which platform you’re on with Firefox?

When you say you can’t see the illustrations, can you see the other images on the site? The series illustrations are at the very bottom of the homepage—do you see broken images there?

10 years ago @ The Toast - Reasons I Would Make A... · 6 replies · +82 points

I fixed it. Not going to lie, it is incredibly satisfying to just go in there and tidy things up and if The Toast doesn't take my login away I will just keep doing it, forever.

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 1 reply · +2 points

A couple of things here. We are right now working on modifying the default search query, apparently WP does not search author names by default, because ¯\_( wordpress )_/¯ So right now, search isn't matching Haley's name as an author, it is only matching on her name appearing in the body of Mindy's post.

For future posts, we have set up proper structuring for multi-author posts, and also proper user accounts for illustrators. Unfortunately "person" structures on the old posts are a hot mess and we have little way to remediate that in an automated way. So for old posts:
* Illustrators are not handled as user accounts, they are just noted in the text (as in Haley's example above)
* Multi-authors are their own entity, often without a user account (see: Matt and Jaya)
* Authors are often included in the tags, which results in some inaccuracy in search
We don't have any good way to fix the problems on the old posts.

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 1 reply · +2 points

This has already been fixed and is waiting for our next code push.

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 0 replies · +1 points

We do support multi-author posts now! We also support user accounts for illustrators too! We even support multi-illustrator posts! The miracle of database fields.

That doesn't fix any old posts, however, so Matt & Jaya are still a combined author entity on past posts. But this will help a lot for future posts. We're also fixing some problems with author search, as in, right now it doesn't exist.

New co-authored posts will not show up in the recircs, because it turned out to be way too much of a performance hit to check if an author was a co-author on anything. So we would probably recommend keeping "Nicole and Mallory" and "Matt and Jaya" as their own unique author entities.

That is probably way more than you wanted to know on the subject of multi-author handling.

10 years ago @ The Toast - We Redesigned The Toas... · 1 reply · +4 points

Honestly, this was one of the smoothest projects we've ever worked on. We all really, really like each other so that goes a long way. None of us are in the same city so we did everything via Slack. There was, well, zero yelling and also zero whiteboarding. (If we were in the same room I bet there would have been some drawing but still no yelling.)

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