One Size Fits All

Scott Hardie | October 5, 2013
It's my pleasure to debut the latest version of Funeratic today! The entire site has been redesigned to make it fully compatible with all devices, including phones and tablets. I've heard from members who struggled to guess goos or play pirate battles on the small screens of their phones, and this clean new look is the solution to that problem. Every page should now stretch, contort, and rearrange as necessary to display nicely on any screen size. (Try resizing this browser window to see.) There are lots of other benefits to the redesign as well:

Navigation menu: There's now a menu across the top of every page that can take you to almost any page on the site from anywhere else, instead of requiring you to move about between sections in separate windows. If you like, you can dock the nav menu to the top of the screen, so that it will follow you as you scroll down. I have reordered the sections according to their popularity and levels of participation. When something big debuts on the site, a large promotional image will announce it at the top of every page, disappearing once clicked.

Subscriptions: Your subscriptions are now available on the sidebar of every single page, so there's no more need for Dashboard. They'll automatically refresh every 60 seconds as long as you keep any page open, and the title tag will change to reflect new items that suddenly appear. You can also now sign up to receive every single subscription as an instant email, and/or receive a "daily digest" email that summarizes all of your subscription data for the last 24 hours. For you RSS fans, you can now create a personal RSS feed containing your subscription data.

Sharing and discovery: You can now Like or Tweet about any page by using the buttons in the header. I have also fundamentally altered thousands of pages on the site to improve their indexing by search engines, to attract more visitors. Please keep sharing whatever you like on Funeratic: The more links there are to this site, the more attention we can attract. Within the site, many pages have a new section at the bottom offering visual links to related content, making it easier to discover more content on the site. For instance, look up a member of the site and you'll see a section at the bottom linking to their friends and family.

Highlighting: Ever forget whether you've seen something before? Funeratic now remembers for you, and highlights new content automatically. Each new comment in a discussion, each new goo, each new play in a pirate battle, and more content is highlighted to make it easier to find. I'm working on even more elements related to this, as I think it's a very useful element. Unfortunately, there is no historical data prior to today, so some old pages will be highlighted in their entirety (Funeratic doesn't know you already saw that page months ago), but going forward this should work well and help us to browse the site.

Fun sidebars: Lots of information is now available on the sidebars: Birthdays and anniversaries, site news, fun trivia about each section, and more. Celebrity Goo Game has a "Guess Again" sidebar that lets you re-play an old goo from years past, and a preview of upcoming goos when there are some in the system. Tragic Comedy has a "Song Crush" sidebar where you can share new songs that you love, and a "Quote of the Day" box reminding us of a fun quote from the past (sometimes humorously taken out of context). Pirate Paradise will remind you what feats you have not yet accomplished, to help focus your activity in the game. Various "top ten" lists in each section round out the list. I have plans for more sidebar elements in the future. To keep each page visually balanced, the sidebar will automatically shrink on shorter pages.

More images: The color and visual excitement in this new design needs to come from images, and I've got that covered: Each goo category now has a photograph, and I'm working on adding photos for every chapter, attribute, defect, and skill in Gothic Earth (thanks for the help so far, Kelly). The faces of individual pirates now appear throughout Pirate Paradise. Theme images in Celebrity Goo Game are now much larger. Gothic Earth characters now appear in color. Most of the main menus and some sub-menus (like Browse Goos) have been redesigned with large photographs to assist in browsing. Even the "silhouette" graphics for members who never submitted a photo have been replaced with real photographs. To zoom in on the full image for any Funeratic member or Gothic Earth character, visit their profile on the site and click on their face in the center of the screen.

More color: Each of the site sections now has a new color, and I'm pleased to see Celebrity Goo Game and Gothic Earth return to their original blue and purple respectively. Look for each section's color as an outline effect on any image to indicate that the image is clickable. There's a separate colored favicon for each section of the site, so your Pirate Paradise bookmarks will look different from your Tragic Comedy bookmarks.

Better search results: Pirate Paradise and Gothic Earth can now be searched, something never available before. Better yet, every page on the site now shows up in search results: In the past, you could only look up goos in Celebrity Goo Game, but you can now look up player profiles, theme and season, information, player achievements like the hall of fame, and even miscellaneous pages like the rules, and this is true for each section. If you search in the gray section of the site, you'll get results broken down by section; if you search within one of the sections, you'll get colorful photographic results just for that section.

This project began as a redesign of Tragic Comedy back in March. I liked the individual looks that I had given to the other sections, but none of them displayed well on phones. I went looking for something that would, and when I found a design that I liked, I decided to go ahead and apply it to every section and not just TC, since I was going to have to convert them anyway. What made the project take half a year was a combination of underestimating how very many pages there are on this site, going through three rewrites of the design code to get one that finally clicked for me (thank you Bootstrap for being awesome), and just being busy: The project was 99% done in late August, but a new job and freelancing gigs have consumed my autumn and prevented launch until today.

Even after seven months, I still have only begun to take advantage of what the new design code can do: Most pages on the site have only been given a simple retrofitting and still basically offer the same text in the same order, but I have plans in the future to overhaul every page for better organization and convenience. Consider this redesign an ongoing project in that sense. Plus, now that this roadblock is out of the way, I can turn my attention to the goo game's new format, a fall event for Pirate Paradise, and more.

Most of the site remains the same, but there have been a few shifts. Here's where you can find...
- Dashboard: This is now built into the sidebar of every page, when you have new updates to see. Click in the "on the site" column in Manage Subscriptions to get more.
- Email Subscriptions: As above, manage your subscriptions and click in the "instant email" or "daily email" columns.
- Search: Use the search form at the top of every page.
- Member Map: This is discontinued, but may return someday.
- Request a Goo: This probably won't be compatible with the game's new format this winter, so I have discontinued it, but it may return someday.
- This season's schedule in the goo game: This may not be compatible with the new format, so I have tentatively removed it. The "Upcoming Goos" sidebar element will preview upcoming content.
- Current Discussions and Saved Discussions: These have been merged into a new page just called Discussions. You can also find a list of your saved discussions on the sidebar.
- TC's Rules of Conduct: This page is gone because of the chilling effect it had on new participation, but the spirit of kindness is still an important part of TC and I've alluded to it in various places. I'll restore the "code of conduct" if it becomes necessary in the future.
- Goo-game and pirate-game options for TC discussions: These have been moved to Display Options.
- Players list in PP: It's been changed to Player Earnings.
- Next game session in GE: It's in the sidebar now instead of the header.

Thanks for your patience while I prioritized this project above other work on the site. I hope that you find Funeratic's new features as helpful and its new look as pleasing as I do. As always, please let me know what you think, and whether you find any problems. Thanks and enjoy!

Samir Mehta | October 6, 2013
[hidden by request]

Chris Lemler | October 6, 2013
This site looks great for the iPhone Scott another job well done

Scott Hardie | October 7, 2013
Thanks for the kind words, here and on Facebook. I'm glad it's working well for everybody so far!

Erik Bates | October 7, 2013
[hidden by request]

Steve Dunn | October 15, 2013
Bug report: change email screen returns an error.

Here's the url returning the error: http://funeratic.com/site_email.php

I believe I clicked the link from the "manage my subscriptions" page. (By the way, I need to update my email address).

Steve Dunn | October 15, 2013
At least one of the links to "more information" about the goo game points to:

http://funeratic.com/celebrity-goo-gam/

Needs an "e" at the end.

Scott Hardie | October 17, 2013
Thanks, Steve! These have been corrected.