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  Social network rainbow & dumb browser tricksAug 17, 2015 11:26 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The brand new episode 26 e-book is now available for purchase from the episodes & e-books page! (And supporters of the A* Patreon campaign at the appropriate support levels will get their complementary download link for the e-book e-mailed to them at the beginning of next month.)
 
And there's a Patreon button on the front page now, in a bar below the comic—where there had been just a Patreon blurb and text link—along with buttons to the A* areas of some other popular social networks! And if the network of your choice (like G+ or YouTube or deviantART) isn't listed there, you might be able to find it on the about page, where I had space for all of them at once. And it really was just coincidence that the ones I especially wanted to fit on the front page happened to form a nice blue to purple rainbow echoing A*'s own color scheme! ^_^
 
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While I was rearranging stuff, I went ahead and moved a lot of things around behind the scenes, basically moving the triggers for various Javascripts (like the bookmark widget below the comic) out of the main block of code on each page, which helps everything except the bottom of the page (where they all got lumped!) load faster, for smoother site browsing, especially in the Chrome browser, which for some strange reason likes to flicker and redraw the page every time it gets a Javascript launch trigger. ; P Silly Chrome! Anyway, if you're flipping through the comic quickly you should find it a little smoother now, so huzzah!
 
The one widget whose loading I was *not* able to accelerate to my satisfaction was the little TopWebComics voting widget at the right of the social networking bar below the comic; in order to display A*'s rank in their list of many online webcomics (determined by daily reader votes, which I greatly appreciate! ^_^) right on the widget itself, it has to load the data from the TWC site before it can display itself on *my* site, which means it can only load as fast as the TWC site + a round-trip data request, which is about a half-second slower than A* is loading—which is too slow! : P It was a little distracting popping in late on every page, so I replaced it with a static TWC button, which works just like the old one did—clicking it takes you to the daily A* vote button—only it doesn't display the current rank on the button itself. If you miss the old rank-displaying version, never fear! It is still displayed on the aforementioned "about" page.
 
Optimizing the Javascript deployments did end up involving changing nearly every page on the site (mostly because I'd put a Quantcast demographic data gathering script in a poorly deployed position right at the *top* of each page's code, instead of at the bottom >_<); I spot checked representative instances of most of the altered pages, but if you do find one that is now somehow goofed up, do let me know!
 
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Just to get super-geeky on this little weekend site-wrangling adventure, I came across a couple silly technical things while trying to figure it out—mostly in Google Chrome (Firefox is my personal power browsing choice, so I use Chrome as my alternate for testing when I'm tinkering with things).
 
For one thing, Chrome, at least in Windows XP, is not quite as thorough as it should be when deleting all browsing data: you can delete the cache and cookies and browsing history and everything, but Chrome will still retain a memory of something to do with the layout positions of certain page elements; I found this out because after I replaced the TWC dynamic widget, which would perform a delayed flicker-in after each page turn of the comic, with the static version, then deleted all my browsing data in Chrome and flipped through the comic to test the response, the static button, which is just a normal web graphic image in a normal hyperlink, was still flickering in late, as if it was still the dynamically generated version! So I guess Chrome saves a sort of layout scheme of the page in RAM or something, probably to accelerate page display times, and this remains resident even after deleting all browsing data—it only goes away once you completely close and restart Chrome. : P
 
Second, Chrome (and even Firefox, although Chrome is more stubborn about it) is very reluctant to check to see if a Javascript called by a page is actually updated. So, if you haven't cleared your cache since you saw the pre-social-networking-bar version of the site last week, if you scroll down to the very bottom of the comic page you may find a second copy of the bookmarking widget sticking rather awkwardly out of the left side of the ad box down there. This is because I didn't know enough Javascript to make the bookmarking widget load itself in the correct place under the comic while triggering it from the script quarantine area at the bottom of the page, so I removed the part of it that assembles the graphic parts of the widget together, and now I just do that in the my Perl script that puts the rest of the page together—but if your browser hasn't thought to load the new version of the script, it now (temporarily) gets two versions of the widget put together: one below the comic, assembled by my Perl script, and one in the script dungeon at the bottom of the page, assembled by the old version of the bookmark widget's Javascript. I suppose what I should have done was rename the new version of the Javascript, so the browser would think it was brand-new and definitely download it, but ah well, the browser should get around to checking it eventually. :"P
 
 
 
 
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