About the Suite101 Style
About the Suite101 Style
This is a style available for the Suite 101 Hitch-hiking archive.
This style reproduces the look and feel of Suite 101 in 1999. I pilfered it from the WayBackMachine and made some slight modifications.
Suite 101 had a parchment coloured style prior to this which is lost to time for the moment, though it appealed to me, and many editors there more than this mustard colored style. Still, this style appeals to me more than the current style of Suite 101, which while essentially similar is far noisier and less attractive to my eye.
The changes I made to this style include changes I requested at Suite 101 at the time which were never implemented. They improve the presentation some in my opinion.
Changes are:
- All the links to other parts of the old Suite11 topic or site are not functional - I haven't archived all of the Suite 101 Hitch-hiking topic (yet) and have no plans of ever archiving all of Suite 101.
- I removed the banner ad from the top of the page.
- The width of article is now 80% of the window width. It was a fixed 600 pixels, meaning people with large screens had a thin article squashed into the left hand side of the screen. The argument at the time was that a fixed pixel width permitted more controllable formatting, and this argument has been used many times elsewhere. It has some merit, but not enough in my mind and is just a painful waste of screen space.
- The feedback mechanism was changed from selecting 1 to 5 stars from a drop down list and clicking a button to simply clicking a button. We generally got very few ratings at Suite101 and I always argued that a a one click rating method would find more people rating articles than a click, select, click method.
- Suite 101 introduced a bug in a redesign which meant that all articles with italics in their titles (of which I had a good few) displayed with the <i> tags in the title. This looks incredibly bad, took 30 seconds to fix, and Suite 101 to this day haven't fixed and I refused on principle to rework the titles of already published articles.
- The links next to the topic graphic in the top right were fixed so they didn't wrap. They used to wrap on the actual site (that is, the bullet was on one line and the text on the next). It took them a few years to fix this at Suite 101 and it was a 10 second fix!
Alas Suite 101 was a site which never prioritised user interface design and maintenance very highly in my experience. There were and are a lot of things about the site that make it simply unappealing to use in my opinion. Still, that is where these articles were published and I provide for historic reasons this same look and feel (it works quite well with most of the features disabled and some of the rough edges polished I guess).
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