This is the week The Toast was born anew! Let’s all talk some more about how much we love the redesign. And if you have yet to fall down the rabbit hole reading all the nerdy technical deets / listening to the related podcast, I can vouch that it’s a good way to spend your afternoon.
“Only diaries, letters, and memoirs—and Nightwood itself—preserve the atmosphere and events of those tense, languid, wine-fueled days” at Hayford Hall.
New cartoons by Liana Finck!
WHY IS THIS ANYONE’S JOB THOUGH
“Nothing Going On Here Resembles A Trashcan Fire” and other Songs from a Mountain Goats Album in Which Cicero is Not Mentioned and Everybody’s Marriages Work Out
Very comforting photos from the cemetery.
Church history puns that Mallory couldn’t stop herself from making, assuming she tried.
Have a fun and festive Halloween, Toasties; we love you a lot.
I didn’t get a chance to say this earlier this week, but I love love LOVE the redesign. It’s so easy to nerd out on my phone during my lunch break. Thank you! I hope everyone has a splendidly spooky Halloween.
I love the redesign and the website now works so smoothly and quickly and doesn’t crash things anymore (and is very pretty).
But I did just find something that isn’t working so great (or maybe I’m missing something). Someone mentioned The Toast as a straight women’s site in an Autostraddle comment, so I went to search for all of the LGBT content you have to show her, and there is something funny happening with categories. Like, maybe they don’t exist anymore? Which is fine, but for example, there is no way by searching any obvious term that the Calamity Jane article would come up if you’re looking for queer content on this website. I clicked on the “LGBT” category tag on one article, and a bunch came up (although not all – for example, the one about being Queen Anne’s lesbian companion did not), but there’s nowhere to find that category tag in navigation, and searching “LGBT” only brings up one article.
Maybe this is on purpose, but it seems like a really useful thing to be able to click on one category (or tag) and find everything that belongs in that category. Or maybe you know it’s a problem, but in case you don’t, fyi I just tried to do this and it did not work so great.
Nevermind! Glad categories are part of the redesign plan. But maybe the thing is then that the categories are missing articles that don’t fall only in one category (like the Queen Anne article)?
A STRAIGHT WOMAN’S WEBSITE WELL I NEVER
Right?
A little update from the redesign team, if you want to know what we’ve been up to, besides sending our moms all the nice things you’ve said about the redesign:
* Category and series pages will be up soon! (In fact they are already there if you’re the kind of person who goes around sniffing out pages from URL hierarchies.) They’re not fully styled yet or linked to the main page, but we’ll have that done soon-ish.
* You all liked the ads so much we added another ad slot right between the author bio and the comments. That’s not hooked up yet so you will see a giant glob of whitespace, which we hope you will enjoy in the meantime.
* Logged in commenters are STILL seeing name/email/website fields, despite our best efforts to remove them. Ethan is fiddling with the knobs, when he is not delivering lengthy soliloquies on the subject of IntenseDislike, in GIF format.
Also! Search is currently broken. We are trying to make it search author names (it doesn’t by default) and in protest it has stopped searching at all. We are ON IT
Kudos to you and the Tech Team for all your hard work. I feel like I’m getting a look inside Batgirl’s cave.
upvoting changing the thumb color is broken for me again, I’m assuming that it’s part of Ethan fiddling with things, someone buy Ethan a lovely drink of his choosing, and let him know we appreciate his work on our behalf, please?
Hi, Ethan here! This bug _should’ve_ been fixed early last week—are you still seeing it, cosetthetable? If so, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected], and we’ll try to track that issue down.
Thank you!
It was broken for a short period of time on Friday night and is now fixed again!!
YAY. So good to hear, thank you!
I JUST WHITELISTED THE TOAST DOT NET AGAIN AND NOTHING CRASHED MY BROWSER IT WAS GLORIOUS
Loving the new design – excellent work, design team! It’s so nice to have pages load and scroll without weird crashes or freezes or jumpiness.
That said – this is a test comment for me because I cannot tell if I am logged in. IntenseDebate tells me I am but the Toast remains aloof. I tried commenting in the open thread earlier and got a ‘Sorry’ message.
Aaand I guess I’m not. Got the ‘Sorry, please tell us your name’ message when I hit Submit Comment. I have tried logging in on the IntenseDebate website and clicking through to the Toast from there, and logging in while in a Toast comment section, and am not recognized either way. I’m using Safari on an iPad (my only tech connection at home), is it a Safari thing?
Your comment came through moderation this time and I approved it, if that helps?
Thanks Nicole. I’m not a prolific commenter so not being able to log in isn’t a huge hassle. Hopefully it’s just one of the early-days bugs!
I don’t have to press the submit comment button twenty times and reload the page three times to comment anymore, and it is amazing.
I’m curious: If 100% of readers, even the random Twitter-link-followers, stopped blacklisting your ads, would you be making enough scratch to be 100% independent of Nicole’s husband? Or do ads not even pay enough for that anymore?
(Thank you for buying the redesign, Nicole’s husband.)
This might go away on it’s own but the front page is currently showing articles ad being from 4500 years ago. DST may have broken the site a little.
This might go away on it's own but the front page is currently showing articles ad being from 4500 years ago. DST may have broken the site a little.
I love love love the new design! So fast! So clean! so open! So so so FAST!!!!!
I’ve been quite enjoying the re-design myself, like many others, not nearly as much browser crashing fun.
However I also really wanted to post this and maybe signal boost, really, but if you’re a DC toastie (or NoVA or Marylander) then Brave Spirits Theatre’s production of Henri IV: The Re-gendered Repertory is an absolutely amazing production that should have seats filled every single night. It is the entire story re-imagined in a matriarchy. With modern music, sometimes in the play itself and sometimes as background. And so very few men! I mean how is this not the toastiest thing ever?! Here is a bit talking about the production (on the subject of ‘why do that?’)
“I recently had a conversation with a male actor who asked the same question:
**
HIM: So, if you’re re-gendering the entire show, how many roles will there be for men?
ME: One male will be cast. Maybe two. There will be 10-11 women cast.
HIM: That doesn’t seem fair.
ME: Doesn’t it?”
(this is from the production blog here: http://bravespiritstheatre.blogspot.com/2015/09/t…
Anyway, here is the rest of the information about the production: http://www.bravespiritstheatre.com/current.html Treat yourself to it. It is worth the trip to Alexandria. If you don’t want to go alone tell me when you’re going and I’ll go with you.