Thanks, RonDog, for the heads up. Your note on post on #76 is very informative regarding the Easter changes here on the FR software/format.......
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"So this whole effort was to find the perfect FONT??? And perfect headline color? I am still annoyed and liked FR much better a month ago before all the changes..." - alisasny
"Acually, the exercise had nothing to do with finding the perfect font. We are in the process of expanding the forum software. We are going to be adding several new forums and new features over the coming weeks.Hooray for Plan B! Free Republic RULES!!! (Particularly now that you can READ it again.)
We added the left side menu bar so we would have a place to list the new forums as well as the new navigational tools that will be needed for the new features we are adding. We did not want to eat too far into the right hand sidebars so we added the new area. And we introduced the blue colored background (and flag image) to act as a separater to separate the new side bar from the text area. We also added a box around the center text area for the same reason.
Many people said the flag background made the page harder to read so we removed it. No big deal and no loss. They also said the font was too small, so we increased it. The blue background and the box around the center text was thought to make the page look too busy, so we went to an all white background, removed the box and left more white space as the separater.This actully would have worked very well for what we were trying to accomplish, however, we found that it would not work out for our WebTV users. Seems their browser is not very wide and our new left side menu was pushing their right sidebars off the page.
Ok, so we punt and go to plan B. We remove the left side menu and move most of the navigation tools back to the top of the page. We've now gone from two lines of navigational tools to three lines, and we've moved the list of forums back to the right sidebar. So, we will now try to find places to squeeze in the new links for our additional new features as we add them, without making any additional drastic layout changes. I think the current layout is functional and not all that cluttered or "artsy fartsy" as at least one complainant claimed.
Hopefully, it will work out well for most people.Sorry about the fire drill. Just keeping everyone alert. Hah!
Thanks, Jim"
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my ping list!. . .don't be shy.
RonDog, thx for the ping.
That being said, I must now offer up my own personal glass of whine. The blue font of the thread links is killing my eyes. Why are my browser color preferences for visited and unvisited links being ignored? The browser preferences allow users, who like myself have trouble with certain colors, to set a preferred font color and maintain consistent colors across web sites. It would sure be nice if the visited/unvisited link colors for FR were the same as my browser preferences.
Thanks again, things are definitely gettin better...