The Mises Community
An online community for fans of Austrian economics and libertarianism, featuring forums, user blogs, and more.

Minor Website Issues

This post has 43 Replies | 14 Followers

Top 500 Contributor
Male
Posts 58
Points 1,305
Peter Sidor Posted: Wed, May 27 2009 3:08 PM

You know it. Every website, that has been around for a while tends to accumulate small problems, typos, migration issues and other ballast. Even with the best webmasters, big websites will have their imperfections hidden in odd corners, waiting to jump on unsuspecting visitors and spoil their experience.

This thread is here to collect such minor issues, so that the webmasters can attend to them, when they have time. If you find some problems, add them. Let's keep the place in shape!

 

 - The link from Mises's biography (http://mises.org/about/3248) to "Books and Essays from Mises (complete text)" doesn't work (is http://mises.org/studyguide.aspx?action=author&Id=280, should probably be http://mises.org/literature.aspx?action=author&Id=280, if there's not a list of study guides on his works or something)
 - Same page, the link to the downloadable photographs is http://mises.org/content/mises.asp#photos, #photos would be sufficient
 - The link to Bettina B. Greaves's Annotated Bibliography of Ludwig von Mises (http://mises.org/product.asp?sku=B051) should be http://www.mises.org/store/Product.aspx?ProductId=24 or http://www.mises.org/store/Product.aspx?ProductId=25 (if they aren't really the same)
 - "Who was Mises" on http://mises.org/misestributes/misesjgh.asp has an unformatted title
 - "The Story of the Lost Papers" (http://mises.org/lostpapers.asp) has some broken special characters, mostly from German umlauts ( G?tz Aly, D?sseldorf, Germany: Hans-Bl?ckler-Stiftung, Moscow?s, Beuteakten aus ?sterreich: Der ?sterreichbestand, Instituts f?r Kriegsfolgen, J?rg Guido H?lsmann, H?lsmann)
 - in the FAQ http://www.mises.org/about/3467#reprint, "every text much be treated in a special way"
 - FAQ http://www.mises.org/about/3467#other missing an LvM Institute in Brazil: http://www.mises.org.br/
  - where's the Russian one? The closest thing I could find is this: http://www.libertarium.ru/libertarium 'Moscow Libertarium' (http://www.libertarium.ru/libertarium/l_eproject)
 - the Bibliography for Frank Fetter page referred to by several pages is missing: http://www.mises.org/fetterbib.asp
 - in Rothbard's works, the "Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics" is displayed twice. Same file, same description, different 'Related' tags.
 - in the biography of A.R.J. Turgot (http://mises.org/about/3244) is a header gone wrong, close to the bottom of the page: selected="true"="true" READINGS
 - in A Scholar in Defense of Freedom (http://mises.org/content/mnrasidof.asp), misformatted header
 - The Unstoppable Rothbard (http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1708) a 'link' across multiple lines
 - http://mises.org/about/3241 Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966): Humane Economist, malformatted headers; also odd bibliography
 - the RSS link in Literature and related pages under the 'Filter By' menu does not work (other RSS links work)

 - in the Literature search, it says in nice large letters how many results were found, but not what exactly was searched for. Unusual. (Okay, this is more of a change request.)

Top 50 Contributor
Posts 787
Points 13,395
banned replied on Wed, May 27 2009 4:39 PM

There are » symbols that break the location bar at the top of a the forum pages.

 

also, the arrows are probably the most rediculous code I've ever seen. There are 60 elements used to make the triangular shape.

  • | Post Points: 35
Top 100 Contributor
Male
Posts 369
Points 7,270
Staff
SystemAdministrator
jtucker replied on Wed, May 27 2009 9:16 PM

Thank you so much!

Jeffrey Tucker
Editorial VP, Mises

  • | Post Points: 35
Top 50 Contributor
Posts 787
Points 13,395
banned replied on Wed, May 27 2009 11:52 PM

Sorry, did you write it?

I really can't see the point in using 60 elements where a 15x60 px .png image would accomplish the same thing and only take up 1 line of code.

(Dunno if you were being sarcastic :/)

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 10 Contributor
Male
Posts 7,643
Points 132,735
MVP
SystemAdministrator

jtucker:

Thank you so much!

More work for you!  Smile

 

If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 10 Contributor
Male
Posts 7,643
Points 132,735
MVP
SystemAdministrator

banned:
There are » symbols that break the location bar at the top of a the forum pages.

 

banned:
also, the arrows are probably the most rediculous code I've ever seen. There are 60 elements used to make the triangular shape.

I'm not quite sure that is right.  It looks like boilerplate template code for the breadcrumbs but for some reason the CSS is inline (the elements) instead of in the css file.

It's about 23,434 characters long right now.  Which is about 22.8kb.  Quite a bit of page bloat.  Probably not good for SEO either, because some of the search engines only index the first 80,000 or so characters.

I agree, it could be done in plain text (attractively enough) or using background images to maintain the current look.  Probably cut that down to approx 1,000 chars.    That's about 1.1 KB.  But then if you use images, you will have to add them in, although they will be cached if I recall correctly.

So potential savings of around 15 to 18 kb per community page load.  Rough guesstimate if the community loads 250,000 times per month, that's... 3.75gb of bandwidth.  I imagine the community probably gets closer to a million page loads a month, but then the blogs don't use the same breadcrumb template.

Another upside is a lower server load per connection and faster browser render times.

Now who will code up some nice CSS breadcrumbs that are lightweight for HeroicLife? Big Smile  I don't do design anymore.

@Jeff, there is a problem with this Tom Woods video.  It is only about 30 MB.  The other ones were all over 100MB.  When I play it, it just cuts off around 15 minutes in or so.  It's #10 in the lecture series.

If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 50 Contributor
Posts 787
Points 13,395
banned replied on Thu, May 28 2009 2:56 AM

Actually, I see the reason it's like that now. In order for the arrow point to be nested within another arrow and also work alone (represent a current location on the forum), each segment needs to be seperate. To fix this, I'm pretty sure the whole template would need to be changed.

 

EDIT: Actually I'm pretty sure this is possible.

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 500 Contributor
Male
Posts 58
Points 1,305

Don't want to start a riot or anything, but wouldn't be the simplest solution to just cut the tiny symbols with 20+kB size out? :)

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 50 Contributor
Posts 658
Points 17,300
eliotn replied on Thu, May 28 2009 5:26 PM

I noticed that on some browsers, it does, well, this:

Schools are labour camps.

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 10 Contributor
Male
Posts 7,643
Points 132,735
MVP
SystemAdministrator

Peter Sidor:

Don't want to start a riot or anything, but wouldn't be the simplest solution to just cut the tiny symbols with 20+kB size out? :)

It's page code that is so big.  The background (blue parts) and white arrow parts are all generated pixel by pixel.  It is a very sloppy way to do that.

I cut down the code to this

<div class="CustomBreadCrumbArea">
<div class="Common">
<a href="/Community/forums/">
<div class="BreadCrumbItem" style="background-color: rgb(50, 120, 185); float: left;">Forums</div>
</a> » <a href="/Community/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=10">
<div class="BreadCrumbItem" style="background-color: rgb(45, 108, 167); float: left;">About</div>
</a> » <a href="/Community/forums/28.aspx">
<div class="BreadCrumbItem" style="background-color: rgb(41, 98, 151); float: left;">Help and Support</div>
</a> » <a href="/Community/forums/t/8098.aspx">
<div class="BreadCrumbItem" style="background-color: rgb(37, 89, 136); float: left;">Minor Website Issues</div>
</a>
</div>
</div>

Which looks like this

 

With a little bit of styling, that could be cleaned up.  Anyone who knows CSS could pad the different links, and add a colour change on mouse hover, and that would probably do.

If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 50 Contributor
Posts 787
Points 13,395
banned replied on Thu, May 28 2009 6:32 PM

It loads a different style for BreadCrumbArrow when it is showing the current location. The segments that would be the tail of another arrow are made white. You don't have to remove the whole element, you just have to make it load a different image when it is showing the current forum location, and since there's already something in place that will alter the element when it's on the current location, this wouldn't be hard to impliment.

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 25 Contributor
Male
Posts 979
Points 15,700
Conza88 replied on Sun, May 31 2009 10:03 PM

When I view my favorite posts, it says I have 9 items. But it only ever displays 3.

http://mises.org/Community/members/Conza88/favorites/default.aspx

 

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 75 Contributor
Posts 410
Points 8,530
fezwhatley replied on Sun, May 31 2009 10:26 PM

a couple complaints:

-When you are on the home page of mises.org, and try to view your profile, it links to a ridiculous condensed profile listing your user tags.

-the intra site search engine in the mises community suckkks

-want the option to change your email address

-some issues with numbering pages on discussion threads

do we get free cheezeburger in socielism?

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 10 Contributor
Male
Posts 7,643
Points 132,735
MVP
SystemAdministrator

fezwhatley:
-When you are on the home page of mises.org, and try to view your profile, it links to a ridiculous condensed profile listing your user tags.

The front of the site and the community are two different sets of software which is why you have different profile listings with the common login.

As some Russian developers I used to work with would say, "This is not a bug, this is a feature."

fezwhatley:
-the intra site search engine in the mises community suckkks

Indeed.  That is a community server (software) issue.  It's not something simple to fix.  Community Server IMO is the best and worst piece of software ever.  But they will improve it eventually.  In the meanwhile, you can use this for google searches.

Put this in the google search

SEARCH TERM HERE site:mises.org/Community/forums/

If you want to search the whole community,

SEARCH TERM HERE site:mises.org/Community/

hth

fezwhatley:
-want the option to change your email address

 

 

fezwhatley:
-some issues with numbering pages on discussion threads

I don't know what that means.

If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North

  • | Post Points: 35
Top 75 Contributor
Posts 410
Points 8,530

thanks for the tips, cant believe i missed itBig Smile

do we get free cheezeburger in socielism?

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 500 Contributor
Male
Posts 58
Points 1,305

liberty student:
The front of the site and the community are two different sets of software which is why you have different profile listings with the common login.

Is that the reason why I am only logged into the 'community' and not the 'site'? I tried to log in to the site as well, but don't get any text fields to do so (funnily enough, I am shown there as logged in). Should I join on the main site with the same username, or???

---

To add something constructive:

 - the notes in Hayek's bio (http://mises.org/about/3234) link to another page
 - http://mises.org/tradcycl/econdepr.asp - many '-'s turned into '?'s
 - in Fun (http://mises.org/content/fun.asp), the link to the Money song is broken - but you can have the whole video from the Python's themselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sor9GzivGbk

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 10 Contributor
Male
Posts 7,643
Points 132,735
MVP
SystemAdministrator

Peter Sidor:
Is that the reason why I am only logged into the 'community' and not the 'site'? I tried to log in to the site as well, but don't get any text fields to do so (funnily enough, I am shown there as logged in). Should I join on the main site with the same username, or???

Your login should be persistent.  I am logged into both right now.  Most of my comments in this thread are from observation and I know some stuff about the web.  I don't actually know how the bridge between the main site and the community is constructed.

If you are still not logged into the front end, then I would completely log out, login to the front end, then enter the community and see if that works.  It just occurred to me that might be it.

If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North

  • | Post Points: 20
Top 25 Contributor
Male
Posts 979
Points 15,700
Conza88 replied on Tue, Jun 2 2009 6:36 AM

The end of this article.

http://mises.org/story/2801

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 200 Contributor
Posts 130
Points 2,585
Arvin replied on Tue, Jun 2 2009 12:22 PM

In the "media section" some of the author names do not show up in the drop-down.

like this:

 

I sent an email to the webmaster earlier but got no reply.

  • | Post Points: 5
Top 500 Contributor
Posts 61
Points 1,860
alerty replied on Tue, Jun 2 2009 5:39 PM

When you open the mises.org website, at the right side of the site, where there is:  Mises Blog / User Blogs / Forums , and you try to click at "Forums", the page is finishing loading and it moves and you accidentally click at  "forums rss".

  • | Post Points: 20
Page 1 of 3 (44 items) 1 2 3 Next > | RSS

Ludwig von Mises Institute | 518 West Magnolia Avenue | Auburn, Alabama 36832-4528

Phone: 334.321.2100 · Fax: 334.321.2119

contact@Mises.org | webmaster | AOL-IM MainMises

Mises.org sitemap