links for 2010-02-15
by Martin Belam, 15 February 2010
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Last week we relaunched the online crosswords on guardian.co.uk. Top techie on the project, Phil Wills, blogged about the changes.
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The launch wasn't entirely without teething troubles, as you can see from this over-active comment thread.
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No main currybetdotnet article from me today, as I've also been blogging about crossword culture and my part in the redesign project over on Inside Guardian.
What seems to be upsetting the crossword nuts is that they can't print the puzzle. Having just checked (print preview on FF3.7), they're not wrong.
Seems like something I'd want to fix, being averse to thousands of hate mails daily.
Having written that I went back to make sure I hadn't missed something. And of course I had. But everyone else is missing it too, apparently, which is something I don't enjoy telling someone in IA :)
[There's no good reason that the 'print version' URI couldn't be a print stylesheet instead, which'd make the IA work better all round, imho.]
My not-quite-a-layman-not-quite-a-techie understanding is that because the crosswords themselves come from some 'magic place' that isn't actually the main CMS, doing a universal print CSS stylesheet wasn't possible. But I could be wrong on that.
The main thing is, of course, that the print option passed testing internally, but we didn't do anywhere near enough to replicate the complete end-to-end chain of browser / OS / browser print settings / OS print settings / individual printer / the fact that every printer for Windows machines insists on installing its own special software with settings.
The fact that the old system used a Java applet meant a lot of people couldn't use our crosswords at all before. Unfortunately, they didn't all rush to say thank you on the first day!