Tech talk

Hi! This is Mike, the self-styled master of this webzone. Since the site is a work in progress, I think it would be a good idea to have a page for technical mumbo jumbo, bug reports, etcetera.

5.30.12 Adaptive Images, Facebookness & more

Been pretty busy with work + bbqing, but finally got around to adding/fixing some more stuff on the site. Here’s what’s been happening recently:

• Implemented Adaptive Images to try and speed up pageload on mobile phones (and just fool around with it in general)
• Added a jQuery lightbox functionality for gallery posts going forward (old uploads are too big to retrofit)
• Changed some of the social links on the front page, now you can “like” us without leaving the comfort of the homepage!
• Added FB like and send buttons to posts
• Swithed up the “THE” in the header image, it was bugging me. Designer problems.

And if anyone knows how to line up that annoying Twitter button on the entries, let me know. It’s in an iframe and is getting some vertical-align screwiness from somewhere, but I haven’t been able to track it down.

Cross Browser

We’ve tested the Beat on the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer (8 + 9). The site works, but isn’t very pretty in older versions of IE. If you run into anything I missed, give a shout to admin@somervillebeat.com.

Mobile

Reading the Beat on your phone or tablet is easy thanks to the magic of responsive design—reformatting the webpage based on your device width.

If you’re on an iThing (iPhone, iPod, iPad) you can add a shortcut to the Beat like this:

1. Tap shortcut icon

2. Tap “Add to home screen”

3. Give it a name

It defaults to “Somerville B”, but I like to just call it “Beat”.

4. Ta-da!

Now a link to the Beat will appear with your apps.