The Fresh Loaf refresh
I've mentioned before that for the past few months I've been working on an upgraded version of this site. It is getting close to ready. Ready enough that if anyone wants to see it, you can.
The preview version of the new site lives at: https://refresh.thefreshloaf.com/
To get past the initial username and password, you'll need to use "freshloaf" and "refresh". This is there to keep Google and other bots from crawling it. It's not ready for them yet.
The preview site is not sending emails and your email address has been scrambled. You can log in if you remember your existing TFL username and password, but if you try to send a password reset email or create a new account, you will not receive the email needed to move forward.
The preview site will get blown away. What you see there was created from a clone of this site's database from a couple of days ago. Anyone is welcome to sign in and post content, but I'll be wiping out everything that has been imported there again soon, likely over the weekend again, as I continue working on the process of migrating the content from the existing site to the new site.
Dorota wrote up more details about the new site here.
It's a work in progress, for sure, but it is getting close enough to be viable soon, I think. I'm intending to try switching this site over to it in a month or so but that depends on me finding the time to continue making fixes and adjustments.
Let me know what you think! I'm sure it'll take some getting used to but I hope it'll still be comfortable and familiar. And hopefully easier to use, particular on phones.
Comments
Hi Floyd,
Laptop user. Only commenting on the home and blogs pages here...
It might be more appealing to the eye than just the current "laundry list" of entries for both comments and posts but, for example, each entry is now taking up four or five lines on my screen rather than the current one single line. Visual appeal is certainly a plus, but facility of use and scrollability, to me, is significantly more important than eye candy.
In the blogs section, there is no list of 10 recent entries to choose from, only the series of expanded entries themselves, making it infinitely harder to review at a glance, pick, choose and return to.
If the goal is merely the look of the home page, then yes. If the goal is to enhance usability, I'm not seeing it and it is a sharp turn backward.
Alan
Thanks for the feedback.
So far visual appeal has been pretty low on my list of priorities. Familiarity, yes, and ease of use, particularly on mobile devices, which yesterday made up 68% of the site's traffic (plus 3 percent on tablet).
The new homepage is deliberately looser and contains more white space, mostly because that works much better on mobile devices than the dense, tight, information rich layouts that used to be favoured when most traffic came from desktops and laptops. I'm a Edward Tufte fan and loved creating the information dense layouts he advocated for, but that just doesn't work on most devices people use now.
Which blog section is so much harder to review? The homepage blog list? I think I'm showing 20 there at the moment rather than 10, but it is listing of titles similarly to the old site.
I'd like to get some of the photos associated with posts back on the homepage to give it a bit more visual appeal, but that has been much lower priority than getting all the content over and making sure the core site functionality works as expected.
I must have been using early morning toothpicks to keep my eyes open and didn't notice the long(er) list of blog entries, so that's that!
"An outstanding question is whether we would have more participation from people on mobile devices if the site wasn't so terrible to use on mobile devices?"
The world has changed since the site first went up and mobile use has exploded. In that regard, unless there can be two distinct versions of TFL - definitely not advocating nor asking to add to your workload, the clear answer should be to accommodate the visual for the majority of members/viewers. Right now, they are behind the 8 ball. And likely should have accommodations more geared toward them.
As an old mainframer, I still have one foot in the old-school and rarely rely on the mobile version (tablet excepted) of TFL. If this is where the future lies, then that format should be the priority.
In the new design, I find I scroll past the blog posts sometimes too. I've added a little heading there, but it still probably could use something to make it a easier to distinguish the change of sections when scrolling. Maybe that is more of a buffer between sections, but maybe that is tightening up the rows a bit. Either one could introduce a break in the visual rhythm that helps you perceive a change is taking place.
We'll work on tweaking and testing it more soon. Again, your feedback is appreciated.
Different version of the CSS styling can be used for mobile and desktop. I'm sure you know about that but what you wrote sounds as if you are trying to come up with a single version that will work on both. That's a large ask!
TomP
Yep! I am applying some styling conditionally based on the size of people's screens. But, yes, as you add breakpoints it increases the amount of coding and testing required by a factor of x2 or x3. We're doing what we can. :)
Hi guys. Appreciate the work you're putting in to update the site, and it's great to see that all the important things will migrate. Will there be any customizability in how it displays? (Icons, tiles, lists, lists with content, etc.) Like Alan, I prefer to access this site from a larger screen than my phone and what I'm seeing is a lot of white space and large account pics with very little content per screen. Zooming out only helps grab a couple more items, but then the text starts getting small.
dw
Thanks for your feedback.
Yes, the homepage will be looser and have more whitespace. At this point, no, user customizations aren't on the list of pre-migration to-dos.
I realize many power users like you and Alfanso use laptops or desktops. Me too. Most of the site traffic though is on mobile now. It's difficult to find the right balance to provide the best experience on both. This site (waves hands at the current design) was built with very few accommodations for mobile devices. The general trend all over the web in the past 10 years has been towards looser designs with more whitespace. Fitting as much as you can "above the fold" (on the first screen) used the be the goal; now it is not unusual to see a lot less on a single screen and to have to scroll much more often than you used to. That isn't a bad experience for most people because most people are on their phones and used to scrolling with their thumbs.
An outstanding question is whether we would have more participation from people on mobile devices if the site wasn't so terrible to use on mobile devices? I suspect so, but that's just a hunch. But I'm hoping to make it easy enough / good enough on mobile that authoring a post or replying to a comment from your phone is not a difficult thing to do. It is now.
FWIW, I don't think the tech trends are the only factor in the drop-off. The "sourdough pandemic" that came during covid lock-down has had a big influence as well. There was such an influx of newbies all asking the same questions that it was a bit overwhelming to keep up with, and I can only speak for myself, but I didn't want to keep reading and responding to same questions. I wanted to spend my time differently. I'm guessing by the disappearance of many of the previous long-time regulars during that time, that I'm not the only one. When most of the newcomers went back to work, many without having even been successful in getting their starters up and running or baking a successful loaf, they gave up on their sourdough aspirations and haven't looked back. But it left a void here. And a hangover of sorts that the site hasn't yet recovered from.
I spend a lot of time researching on my own about anything I am interested in that applies to baking of all sorts. I look up and compare and make notes until I get a compendium of answers. I then make a plan and try out ideas based on the new info incorporated with my tried and true info . I realize an all new baker might be overwhelmed by all that is out there now . It is certainly WAY more than when I started baking in the mid '70's and used magazine articles and booklets from the grocery check out aisle as well as friends' handwritten recipes and the always reliable Yellow packets of Fleishmann's Yeast !! I still have a bunch of those . :) Anyway I hope we get some more traffic if that's what's in the cards for us. I always enjoy seeing posts from the " old" crew. c
FWIW traffic and engagement on the site had been steadily falling for about 8 years before the pandemic hit. Many people moved from here and other single topic message boards to Facebook groups, Instagram, etc., myself included. Posting here is a bigger pain than just taking a photo and throwing it up on IG. But I am hoping the upgrade in technology, which also is necessary just to keep the site running securely, will reduce the friction a little bit.
The pandemic sourdough craze did lead to a spike in traffic. Yes, I can see it being a bit like a sugar rush that left the community feeling a bit drained afterwards. It wasn't something I cultivated or encouraged, obviously, just the way things went.
And, actually, you know what the other huge hit during the pandemic was? Frog bread. A silly little post I made when my kids were little went viral. If you go search #frogbread on Instagram you'll find thousands of posts of people baking it. That's going to be my legacy, apparently. Who knew?
It's really cute, so not a surprise that it went viral when kids were stuck at home and parents had to entertain and keep them busy. You can think of it as a public service :)
I don't have any issue with posting except the photographs. I used to be able to easily post as many photos as I wanted and could adjust their size via the already available technique but that no longer works so I have stopped posting for the most part as I am not able to get my photos small enough. It would be wonderful if this was figured into the upgrades you are working so hard on. Thank you and good luck with all of this. Trying to meet so many desires has got to be a huge challenge. c
Yes, the photo posting here now is terrible.
I set it all up back when we were all on desktop computers and the photos coming off most of our cameras (not phones) were under 4MB. The workflow also used to be that we all would tether our cameras to our computers and download the photos into iPhoto or whatever before uploading them to the site, so any resizing or cropping could happen there. That simply isn't the way most of us manage and share photos now. Most of us do it all on our phones.
I think I've got the new site set up so you can upload a larger file, like an 8 or 10MB photo, and then it will get compressed on the server. I need to test that more to confirm it is working correctly, but that would go a long way towards making the site less terrible to use on a phone.
This is ALL Greek to me lol! I’m glad you are so capable! Thank you for devoting so many hours to this endeavor. 🙏
Yes the photos are the biggest pain point for me as someone who posts blog posts quite often. Since iPhones now take a pretty large file size photo, there are the extra clicks now to choose a smaller size in order to upload them.
It would be incredible if we could choose more than one photo at a time to upload, that would be a lovely wish and probably not the most important thing from your perspective.
I look forward to your updated website!
Happy Holidays Floyd.
Benny
Probably a long shot, but here goes: I have a Windows PC and Android phone. Using phone link on the PC I can see my phone gallery photos and right click/copy one of them and then paste into several open app windows on the PC, eg Word, Onenote, Irfanview.
Probably there is something similar in the Apple world.
Would it be possible to directly paste into a TFL open topic or reply window in a browser to insert a photo?
Lance
Thanks for your feedback.
There is a javascript library I may be able integrate, either now before the launch or afterwards, that would allow dragging and dropping of images in some locations. I haven't tried it yet on the new site. I'll add it to my too do list.
Thanks Floyd - and for all the hard work that you and your team have put into this necessary upgrade.
Lance
And from me too!
haha "your team" in this case is just the two of us on the weekends. (While doing Christmas shopping and preparing for our daughter's birthday)
for letting Floyd spend his copious hours allowing us to entertain ourselves on TFL.
We just returned from PDX (did you two meet at L&C college in the SE quadrant?). We lived off W Burnside at the foot of Washington Park, perhaps known at the time as much for the Zoo Bombers as the Rose Test Gardens.
You may not know from being away for so long - sadly Pearl on Davis shut down several years ago. We stayed once more at an Airbnb literally around the corner from the SE Hawthorne Grand Central bakery, making that our daily breakfast stop. Ken Forkish sold his Bakery to two long time employees and headed for Hawaii.
We miss PDX greatly, having gone back to visit for lengths of time, and although we didn't pull up stakes there for this reason, our recent visit reminded us of the chill of November that accompanies the near endless low dark clouds and rainy skies. If it weren't for that, PDX might well have become our forever home, although I still don't think they're renting out any self-service living quarters at the Horse Brass just yet 😬!
Alan (standing next to the Horse Brass I contributed on my second visit there).
Close! We met at Reed College, which is SE Portland. Lewis & Clark is in SW.
I think I'd heard that Pearl Bakery closed but, indeed, I haven't been there since before the pandemic. A lot has changed there since then, I'm sure. But not the Horse Brass! It's nice to see that a few of those old institutions are still around.
Small in numbers, big in performance ;-)
Lance
Will the uploading accommodate posting multiple photos at once or r will still be the same tedious process of placing the photos one by one? I like to post pictures of my whole process. Not an easy thing to accomplish as things are now.
A new tedious process? I think the new upload approach is somewhat smoother and easier but I don't think there is support for bulk uploads.
Hi Floyd,
Thanks for upgrading the site - a lot of work I can imagine.
The new website works much better on the phone. I especially appreciate that long threads are much easier on the eye now - the photos don't get condensed into minuscule proportions especially if comments have been building upon each other. Readability is definitely improved. Thanks very much for that!
You mentioned that visual appeal is very low on your list of priorities now. But whenever you might think of looking into this - the photos and "bread browser" were a major draw for me when I first joined the forum about 3 or 4 months ago. I liked that Benny's Polenta Loaf would be there every other morning when I logged in. I also really liked the bread suggestions given by way of thumbnails on the margins/bottom of each page and would always click on a few. So these would be very nice to have again.
One thing I did notice is that the search function works differently on the new site. On this old site, if I wanted to go back to an old thread, I would generally key in OP's name in the search box and most forum and blog posts made by them would emerge. I think the search function on the new site doesn't work the same way. E.g. I've been contributing to Sev's "WW loaves" post weekly and the way I retrieve it over the weekend is by searching "Sevitzky" - the post would be the first result on this old site, together with other posts made. Keying that into the new site returns no results.
Also - perhaps the search bar could be made more prominent in the upper right of the page?
P.S. As a new member, I want to say that this website has a lot of appeal to me because of its community. Interaction here is genuine, thoughtful, constructive. I used to post much more on IG but no longer - I prefer it here. The old site worked well enough for me both on the laptop and on the phone, and the new site would work even better, so many thanks for that. Perhaps you might (or not) be surprised at how often the site is still referred to and recommended in podcasts and sorts. So yes, the site still retains its appeal to some new, mobile users, and I think many are interested to stay too.
I have an ongoing beef with the old site about searching. The results aren't ordered by date. I'd prefer them to be ordered by date descending. Even better would be several optional orderings
TomP.
Search is order by search ranking, I believe, which might take date into account but certainly doesn't weigh it as the most important factor. It's usually a mix of whether the search term is in the title or the body, how many of the words in your search match, and sometimes the type of item being searched.
I'm trying to think of any website where search works like that (order by date descending). I just tried a half dozen news and social sites and none of them sort like that, though some do provide date range filters like "past week", "past month", and "past year".
Search by relevance can be all right, but using a one or two word search phrase there is not much semantic content to assess relevance. The way I mostly use search, I want to find some recent thread that I've read but don't have a starting link for any more. If that thread shows up in the search results on page 9, I'll never be able to find it. For example, I might remember that Debra Wink wrote something about pH when developing a new starter. If I search for Debra Wink on the old site, the hits will be all over the place in terms of their date. If I search for "Wink starter", I'm never sure whether it will be interpreted as "MUST include both Wink and starter" AND "include wink, starter, OR both".
I use Thunderbird as my mail client. Firefox has a long list of ways you can order the displayed items. You just select one from a drop down list. In fact, it has several categories and you can choose an ordering method for each of them. That's a model that would work for me. One of the choices could be relevance:
sort-order-example.png
I'm not asking for all those options! But it gives you the idea.
Right... That's cool but this is a website, not a desktop email client. I'm not going to be able to offer that, but at some point (probably post-launch) I may be able to get slightly improved keyword searching that factors recentness into the ranking.
Personally, today, if I wanted to pick up on a thread I started and wanted to check up on? I'd use the history in my browser.
I agree with you TomP; most recent would be more useful, but I don't think I've ever seen that ordering of results on TFL
If I want to do a "serious" search, I resort to Google programmable search as a site specific search, where you can select to have results by newest first. BTW, "normal" Google search by site won't do it.
programmablesearchengine.google.com/
It's a one time set up and then save it as a bookmark. You need to be signed in to Google to set it up.
Possibly Floyd could incorporate it into the new look site at some point (giving him work overload here!) - and whether that's even possible without all the baggage that Google can bring, I don't know.
Lance
I realize that featuring other people's breads on the homepage has been a lot of what draws new users in here. I'm not against adding features like that again in the future, just so far my focus has been on getting existing users and content from the old system to the new.
I'll check on search. I'm using the same default search module, but I haven't reindexed it after importing all my content. It may just need to be refreshed. Ultimately I'd like to switch to a better search solution, just, again, time and priorities.
thanks for all the hard work & the opportunity to take a test drive!
As a mostly-mobile user, I understand the desire to make it more phone friendly ... but ...
I use a small phone (iPhone mini) and I find the new format confusing:
--some of the text bumps off the screen
--at least on my display, the initial scroll of forum posts lists person and time, but not topic -- and my primary method of moving around the site is by clicking on topics
--people who post but haven't uploaded photo ids get a giant bread slice smiley by default & this causes layout freakout on my phone
--For sure, I tend to have a pugnacious, old-school attitude, but I don't need all the new white space, which to me makes posts look like pop-ups.
Maybe i'm just allergic to change and I'll grow to love the new look. But, honestly, from this quick demo, I'd say it will make using the site more frustrating for me.
Sorry for my strong reaction. Thx again for all the care you are putting into tfl. This site has taught me pretty much everything I know about bread.
Rob
Hmm, that doesn't sound right: the smileys should be just 25 pixels wide, which would be tiny even on a small screen. I haven't tested on older phones much. I will try to do so soon and see if I can reproduce and fix that issue.
Hi Floyd,
FYI, what I'm seeing doesn't resemble the image in your initial post (which looks fairly nice). Instead of uniform rounds, everyone's avatar is displaying square or rectangular, and all different sizes with the smiley face bread slices quite large.
The blog post section has nice large font to draw the eye to the title, but none of the other sections do. The font itself is more of a black Times Roman than the brown arial I see in your image.
I refreshed the new site this morning.
We are working on the theming a bit, going easier on the bold and pure black. Not yelling quite as much and lighter type means more fits on smaller screens and there is less text wrapping. It is stlll a work in progress.
The oversized avatar issue is weird, I've not been able to reproduce it yet. What browser/os/device are you using? The one other user report of that was on an iPhone mini.
Yeah, I believe the issues you all are seeing are in iPhones running iOS 16 or earlier. Newer iPhones render fine.
iOS 17 on the left, iOS 16 on the right after I fixed the icons blowing out.
Screenshot 2024-12-07 at 4.55.15 PM.png
Screenshot 2024-12-07 at 4.57.21 PM.png
I'll see what I can do to address it.
I haven't looked at it on my Galaxy S9/Chrome yet, but this is what it looked like on my Surface/Edge when I posted that:
And here's what it looks like now:
The avatars are very small on the left side. Still not displaying the right fonts. I don't envy you trying to figure all this out, but we're rooting for you :)
Thanks for the info and screenshots. That's very helpful.
Yes, I fixed the ones on the left, not the right (yet). Time to make dinner and take care of a few other things. I'll try to get back to it tomorrow as much as time permits.
I think I found and fixed the problem. Not there aren't still styling improvements to make, but it should generally render the same on older browsers now.
For any nerds who find this stuff interesting: I didn't realize I had to use postcss-nested with Tailwind.css to convert my nested selectors to flat selectors. Newer browsers natively support CSS nesting, which is why I didn't notice the problem earlier.
As far as I can tell, the home page is now displaying the way you intended. The problem for me now is that all the images and photos in the comments have disappeared (so far as I can say, they were there yesterday). The image at the top in the original post is still there, just not any of the responses like the one a few comments back where you inserted the side-by-side images on older and newer iphone or my screen shots. /Edited to say I think I figured out the photos in this thread were added after the cutoff, but that doesn't account for the ones posted before that:
I checked a few other threads that I know had photos and it is mostly the same --- photos in the original post but none in the comments. But it's also hit and miss, at least in blogs. All the images are displaying in my panettone tip and its comments, but none are showing up on Benny's Dutch Baby post --- neither in the original post nor the comments where I know he posted a pic of the follow-up bake in November. Not even a little marker or space where the photo should be. Is it about where the photos are uploaded to? (mine are all on this site in my file browser)
Thank you for reporting that.
You are correct: during some of the recent changes we made some of the images got broken. I re-migrated the database today. I believe now the images are showing up.
I went back to the blog section to see if Benny's photos now display for me, but the whole thing (Smoked Salmon, Dill Sour Cream and Cucumber Dutch Baby) has vanished. I thought maybe I just hadn't gone back far enough, so I clicked on his profile and it's missing there too.
It should be between Triple Sesame Spelt ... and Whole Wheat Oatmeal Sourdough ...
Then I went to my own profile and found that The Pineapple Juice Solution, Part 2 has gone MIA as well. These are just two I've noticed, so there are likely more. I hope this is an easy one to figure out.
Those two both got migrated but were marked as drafts (unpublished). I just marked them published, so you should see them now, but I'll need to figure out why that happened and fix it because, yes, presumably there are other posts like that too.
I can see them now, with photos :)