Test Work

hi, y'all.

I'm developing a small web based new aggregator app with en eye toward creating a how-to tutorial.

It would really help me out if y'all would go to the app as it is now and mess with it. I need to know how it behaves for other people, and I am looking for improvement suggestions.

The app is at rss.ramshacklehumanity.com. Post problems or suggestion here, if you would, or you can hit the "Report Bad News " link on the site to email them to me.

Thanks, I appreciate any help I can get.

Thread moved from 'PHP Coding' to 'General Chat' by CodeKadiya.

Reason:

i don't like the fact that your page is wider that 800px..

also, it is very bad to have scroll bars _inside_ your page. i can't use scroll wheel on that, so it makes it harder for me to read your pages..

and horizontal scroll bars (in the left column) are a big no-no!

btw, my rss feed doesn't work ok, because you don't use unicode in your parser.. you should use UTF-8. man, it is the 21st century, and english is NOT the only language people speak on the internet...

I'm also used to use a mouse wheel, with this design, it is not possible.
Also the links in your navigation bar are very close to each other (I use Mozilla 1.4)

hm, I would say the same as Ashkhan
said. the navigation is far to near, hard to keep the words appart. Using IE

Thank you, all good suggestions. I'll switch to UTF-8. I'll also space the navigation more and maybe lesen the width; I use a 15 inch powerbook with the highest resolution I can get, so I forget about that on occasion. The horizontal scroll bars only show in certian browsers, I can probably kill that by widening the feed list section, but some browsers give those bars whenever the vrtical bars are present. That boils down to bad CSS support and I'm tempted to say "tp hell with it and get a modern browser".

I can loose the vertical bars, but that is going to make for some super long pages on most feeds. Ic an use my scroll bar fin inside the page section. Its meant to work like an application with a display window.

ah good idea to make these changes, I think that will make your site a bit better seen from the design view.

yes by doing the above suggestions your site will be alot better also you have to make sure its compatible with ALL browsers old or new for disabled people with screen readers and alike.

The stie will definitely be accesible, I'm looking for 508 validation. As far as old browsers go, I'm coding in such a way that the CSS design will degrade gracefully. In a snese, the users that are using the best technology will get the best experience. Those using outdated or badly made technology will still get a usable page and app, it just won't be as pretty.

I am kind of stuck on the fixed height fields. I may try to use them as fixed percantages, allowing you to use any browser window height you might like. On the other hand, that might create a need for tables, which will make the markup a nightmare for those with screen readers.

On the buttons, I am designing icons for them anyway. That way they will appear more spaced and distinct. For now I have given them backgrounds to make them appear more seperated.

Also, Zombie, your feed works correctly now, though it is throwing a margin onto the right side of the pasred XML. I'm not sure what that's about, but I can probably fix it with the CSS.

Unfortuneately, in order to accomidate the margin, IE drops the text field below the feed feed field. That's an entirely wrong application of the standard, but I'll try to hack around it.

if you validate it against XHTML and HTML 4.0 you can get a fairly good idea that it will work with any browser.

It validates as xhtml 1.1 once I stick in the script type tags in the javascript. I'm a stickler for vaildation and a big believer in web standards.

i think that every site that doesnt validate should be shutdown if they dont correct it. But that might be too extreme....