pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 01, 2026 04:56AM

Side-by-side of in-progress design.

It's not final. Just playing right now. I can't decide if I like the smaller gallery icons (they pop out a bit when you mouse over them), or want them a bit larger. And there's some big gaps around that I don't love.

Broadly, though, this is kind of what I'm thinking.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 01, 2026 05:01AM

Oh, also of note, the thumbnails resize based on screen resolution too, whereas on old site they're static and the 'empty space' becomes larger.

Trying to make everything just a bit more dynamic and .. "fit" properly.

woberto Report This Comment
Date: June 01, 2026 07:19AM

Needs more goats.

Jono Report This Comment
Date: June 01, 2026 08:54AM

For me, and it is personal I know, the new screenshot looks a lot cleaner, sometimes we try to fill space but it can be the space we do not fill that enhances overall

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 01, 2026 09:24AM

@Jono:
Thanks. The gallery does look a bit chaotic at the moment. I like having a border, and the mouse-over 'pop' I think looks good.

I think the new look is a little clinical right now, it definitely needs a splash of colour; I'll add some blue in somewhere I think. And fix the logos size/placement. Maybe alternating them or something.

@woberto:


Agreed. More goats for profit.

woberto Report This Comment
Date: June 02, 2026 02:51AM

The price is on the rebound!
[www.mla.com.au]

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 02, 2026 11:49AM

Damn. Missed the boat Missed the goat boat.

Okay - have made a number of small changes tonight to the dev site; forum.. man.. yeah. Image comments / forum link don't work at the moment. That's going to be the hardest part to get working.

I think it looks a bit nicer; though the side box headers/etc might match the background a bit too close. Anyway, have a look.

[dev.plus613.net]

I also made a spiffy diagonal pattern but .. I think it still needs a touch more 'pop'. But less than this version of the site has.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 02, 2026 01:03PM

Okay I'm just screwing around.

Right now, obviously -- new design is live.

It's not necessarily going to stay live, but some things have hard coded links and I couldn't test on the dev site. sux2beeveryone

In the mean time if you see anything that doesn't work...

Hdhchh Report This Comment
Date: June 02, 2026 01:17PM

Ehdhhs s. D dhdh

Jhgggg Report This Comment
Date: June 02, 2026 01:23PM

Dhhdksjsd. Jk

Onyma Report This Comment
Date: June 02, 2026 06:09PM

I see the Infinite setting, so I scrolled until my computer crashed... but I didn't reach inifinity. I'd like to file a bug.

More seriously... If it was me I'd drop the padding around the thumbnail elements to just a thin white space (m-2?). I see the mouse-over animation aiming to give it a lifted look (there is also a dynamic box-shadow being added). I also design with similar minimalistic animations but I would take the boxshadow down to just a few pixels to accentuate the lift effect. I'd also drop the border radius by half if you cut down the white space. (ditto for all the side elements..) The subtle thin thumbnail border is also a nice touch.

Or... do whatever you like the most! Overall it's a great start!

woberto Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 02:09AM

Gallery 2AC in mobile does not give me good feels. 1AC and infinite doom scrolling is the way.
Also forum page view is borked in mobile.
Desktop looks great all around and I like OnYaMa' feedback so ni bike ride for you this weekend.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 06:29AM

Yeah sideways scroll appears to have disappeared on mobile forum view. I'll check that out. (edit: turn your phone sideways it looks OK; at least on mine)

I agree the side-by-side doesn't work on mobile gallery view; I'll make them closer to what they were, 1 image but still with the rounded edges. The whole thing scales with browser/screen size now, thumbs get bigger/smaller as required.

I also agree on the whole with Onyma's feedback, thanks for that. I definitely agree there's too much white space around the thumbs.

Overall I'm pretty happy with what it looks like right now. In forum/image comment at the moment, there's still a blue box w/diagonal stripes in the header of the boxes. The rest of the side is a very mild/faint blue on the boxes. I'm debating which way to go.

I think it's pretty clean though which is what I was going for. Some modern pops but clean up the site and the code a bit, and make it more manageable. For example, each side box used to have its own design code. Now there's a central CSS which all the side blocks use, so I only need to update style in 1 place now and it affects all boxes, that kind of thing.

Maybe I'll just leave it live like this and fix up bugs as we go. I also changed the "image comment" flag in gallery view, it's not just a speech bubble, it also says "new" at the top of it, AND has a fancy shading. Trying to make it stand out a bit. (speech bubble needs to be bigger)

I'm tempted to get rid of anything except infinite scroll, or at least make it the default for all users and have to change to 'page' view. The page view never made much sense because we always have from newest -> oldest in the gallery, which means page 0 is always new.. so it's not like you can return to page 150 some time later and see the same images on it. I could reverse that but.. meh??

When this is done, I'm toying with creating dark/light mode.. but haven't started yet and will take some time.

I definitely will be doing a ride this morning, because I'm going away for 5 weeks and won't get a chance to do it for a while. But yeah, if my flights are internet enabled then maybe it gives me something to do..



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2026 06:31AM by pulse.

woberto Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 08:18AM

They are kicking off again over there so good luck.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 09:40AM

Flying riiiiight into it.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 12:38PM

Okay. I think I've fixed it all up?

1) I've made a little animation on mouse-over for a thumbnail with a new image comment, with the desire of making the whole thing more obvious.
2) Infinite scrolling is now the default for all users. You need to override it (select an image count) if you don't want infinite and go back to the legacy gallery pages.
3) I've made thumbs bigger and white space smaller. Opinions? More? Less? I've also made the shadow smaller and darker for the 'pop up' of the thumb.
4) I've fixed the forum on mobile. It's better than it used to be in every way.
5) I've made mobile gallery 1 image wide not 2, and increased thumb size
6) When viewing an image in mobile OR a touch enabled computer, you can now swipe left/right on the image to get the same effect as the [ <- last | next -> ] butons (or left/right arrow keys on desktop). I've set minimum swipe at 50 pixels width in 800ms max to avoid "accidental" navigation.

Was there anything else?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2026 12:52PM by pulse.

Onyma Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 07:47PM

Very nice! This is a big improvement. Much better use of screen real estate without loosing the design elements. Mouse-over pop is also much more effective now.

Noticing the NEW and Comment indicators and the transparent overlay fly off when hovered, intentional? Wasn't 100% sure... to me it's a bit distracting but perhaps the intention is to allow full visibility of the thumbnail which makes sense.

Scaling breakpoints also work much better for thumbnail size and reducing columns. Well done. Previous / Next buttons are better sized with colour now. (yeah, myself I'm probably going to stick with the pages... old dog... old tricks...) And the swipe ability is nice too!

Now, we just need "old.plus613.com" like Reddit does for a bit of nostalgia now and again (joking...)

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 03, 2026 10:08PM

Thanks. It's coming along. And definitely swipe on mobile is cool.

Funnily enough, 'old plus613.net' is on the cards and at this stage very easy to do. I can only go back to the 1 previous design, not the original etc but yes I do plan on it.

Once I find the hard linked CSS calls etc it's trivial because this is just spawned from new containers. The old ones are still there and all these changes are in Smarty or CSS not in the site code.

All I need is to redirect to a different back end.. or even have both run side by side like we used to with plus/porn site (if $site =..)

But that's a lot more work.

From here on in though 'old' wouldn't receive any new features so maybe just easier to run the old containers.

woberto Report This Comment
Date: June 04, 2026 03:06AM

Just make sure you are paid up.
I you cop a SCUD we expect the website to stay up for a while before we get the goat.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 04, 2026 05:36AM

I renewed plus613.net the other day for 10 years
So assuming nothing major goes wrong with my upstream, that's 10 years of goat game if nothing else.

You're welcome.

Onyma Report This Comment
Date: June 04, 2026 10:09AM

Out of curiousity what is the software stack / hardware behind the magic?

pulse Report This Comment
Date: June 04, 2026 10:53AM

At the core it's really just basic old tech; standard LAMP style setup.

There's 2 layers of caching proxies externally (Cloudflare + a reverse caching proxy cluster on the edge); feeds into HA nginx cluster.

The core is PHP-FPM; version 8 these days, I think we started with PHP .. 3 or 4. MariaDB cluster in the middle.

The website is drawn by Smarty.

It's all running in containers these days, gone are the dedicated servers of old, but the core tech is still pretty old, just modern versions of it. We do an amount of auto scaling, it's all pretty straightforward.

DK created a POC recently of a "serverless" version of the site then disappeared again. I don't really want to go down that path, I'm pretty happy with how things work these days.

The biggest things I did in this remodel is central points for all the CSS / style designs. Makes it so much easier to change things again in the future..