Themes Going Away
My Listology work this winter might be rather boring. I think I'm going to re-factor the code and remove some of the detritus. Hopefully when I finish that I can get back to the fun stuff of adding new features. One of the casualties is going to be custom themes. This is a feature that has been disabled for some time (for folks that don't already have custom themes) for security reasons and because only a very few people used it. You might not even know it exists, but this code has been humming along in the background, bogging down requests and unnecessarily complicating things long enough. I apologize to those of you that have been using this feature, but it's time to pull the plug. I may revisit the possibility of customizing the Listology look-and-feel at a later date.
Another way of doing custom themes might be to just allow a user to specify a linked CSS file, and then they can write their own and post it elsewhere, and link to it. Or even provide a little space for css files - they're plain text, they can't get but so big. I don't think that would take much code at all.
Unfortunately Listology's current markup is a bit spotty, so bringing it into line would represent most of the work. After that user-defined CSS files might be an option.
Hey, Jim, one thing I've noticed - I don't know how everyone else uses the site, but I rely mainly on the recent activity page. So when you approve posts from members who are being monitered it's really easy to miss new content because (I think) it gets inserted on the recent activities page in the order of when the Listologist posted it, rather than when it becomes available to everyone else. (Sorry, I'm particularly inarticulate tonight. I really hope that made sense.) Anyway, is this something that can be changed? It's not like it's that hard to deal with or anything, but it is really easy to miss something new. Thanks!
Yeah, I've noticed that before too. Thanks for reminding me to deal with it! I've added it to the list.
Can we request new features early? Eh, I'll ask for mine anyway.
BTW, I know very little about computers, much less about programming web sites, so if my request is impossible or just very burdensome, feel free to ignore me.
But I would like the ability to search through all of one user's posts. Many times, I have wondered what Listologist X thinks of Movie Y, searched for it on their content, came up with nothing, and remained curious. I search for Movie Y in the forums, but it turns up 100 hits, and I don't feel like searching through all of those to see if maybe one of those includes a post written by Listologist X. If I could search through Listologist X's posts as well as Listologist X's content, that'd be a lot easier.
Thank you in advance. I hope you get around to this feature after you fix up the code.
One of the key features I want to add once this drudgery is done is super-duper turbo-powered swiss army knife searching. :-) I'd also like to find a way to automatically suck your Netflix queue and Amazon wishlists into Listology automatically. I'm also going to retry "affiliate sites" as a way of getting this site breaking even. In all my free time, of course...
Sounds like one sexy search.