New 'Community' side bar on news articles

Hi all

You've probably noticed some changes on the right hand side of news articles in the last couple of weeks. This has been a bit of an evolution to make the news articles more connected with Facebook, Twitter, the forum and the new calendar system.

Click here for an example of this with most of the features enabled (GP14 Venetian Trophy).

There are a couple more things I need to finish developing, such as making the results thinner when screen/browser resolutions are less, but it would be great to hear your feedback on what we've done so far. Right now I'd hope that anyone who isn't in an office though is out on the water sailing in this weather!

It would also be great to hear if this is causing any problems on the browser / device that you're using. While I can test on all the major browsers and 'emulate' iphones and ipads using Safari, it isn't the same as testing on one!

I'll try keep you posted here as the rest of the features are enabled.

Cheers, Mark

Originally posted by ASok Even on the small screen of the iphone it seems to look ok.  I had expected it to be a bit crowded.

That's great news - I'm test at the moment a piece of javascript that works out the screen width client-side and then can adjust what is displayed on screen depending on that. I think I'm going to try and leave the mobile browsers to it as they seem to do a very good job of scaling pages - the iphone and android phones are very good indeed at this.

It's standard computers with screen resolutions between 800 pixels and 1024 pixels that I think I'm aiming to give a different view.

I have two options for low resolutions:

• Either have the right hand side news bar minimised as standard with a '+' button to maximise it if wanted.
• Display results tables using Arial Narrow instead of Arial at lower resolutions. This could also have a '+' buttom to display the results in a large format.

I'd welcome thoughts as to which approach you think could be best!

Originally posted by maxibuddah works ok on Chrome, android browser & opera mini6 on android. I think though it might be worth slimming it down width wise a little as the page wraps for the zooming in it over-powers the site and takes up too much real estate. I would have thought you could cut it down by a third. Also is it possible to change the font so that it fits in better with the overall site look & feel. At the moment I think that the font makes it look like a bit of an after thought rather than an integrated feed. Other than that its good and a welcome addition.

I really like the idea of making a thinner version of the community side bar for smaller screens - we store photos at 800, 350 and 120 pixel widths so we could make a bar that is around 140 pixels wide. I'll have to see what I can do with the Twitter / Facebook feeds at that width.

I really liked the font change for the side bar, as did those people I got feedback from when developing it. But I'd welcome more opinions on this. Maybe we should have a 'switch font' button!

Hi Furtive,

I'm guessing that you're using quite a browser / screen at around 1024 pixels for this to happen - could you try this link and see what it does?
http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/news/?article=156549&width=180
This is why I'm detecting screen resolution and display a different community bar / thinner results table depending on the resolution.

Cheers, Mark

Originally posted by furtive Hi Mark   Same outcome except the photo and the Twitter box are smaller...

Any chance of emailing a screen grab to mark@yachtsandyachting.com ? Also, which version of IE are you using?