New Shoes for Ftrain

By Paul Ford

This is an administrative notice about the design of this site, and you should ignore it unless you care about Reader Services or printing out sections of Ftrain.

Today, Ftrain looks a little different. For those of you using older browsers, it likely looks like shit. For those of you using newer browsers, it features more of the color gray, and easier-to-read type. The site makes full use of CSS and is designed to look good on Internet Explorer and Mozilla. Since readership is down due to my non-participation in the audience/author relationship, I feel it's a good time to introduce new variables and the possibility of failure.

Two things are notably different:

1. When you print Ftrain, the style changes automatically and the navbar goes away, leaving you with plain, wide-margin pages that look dandy on sheets of paper. This eliminates the need for “plain” and “fancy” versions of the site; links into this site beginning with “plain_” will no longer work.

2. Ftrain Reader Services is gone. It had to go - it'd become unmaintainable, was hogging disk space, and worked for only about 1/5 of the folks fiddling about with it. When I can rewrite it and start over, I will; the idea is still tenable, and useful, just not as implemented. I'm hoping to get things rolling again by September, but who knows.