Free Republic Beta Update: New Mail Features & Font

[John Robinson]

Updated the beta site today. I've added the following new features to the mail system:

• Favorites folder-- you can mark messages as favorites. Favorites are saved into a folder that can be accessed through the "Favorites" tab on the mail interface.
• Search! You can search for messages from people, and you can search for text within messages sent to you.
• and a few miscellaneous changes.

I'm also experimenting with format changes on the index pages.

[ThePythonicCow]

a different background color

See the discussion of the Firefox add-on "Stylish", in posts 77, 82, 86, 89, and 93 of the thread Installing Free Republic Update Tonight *Update: New Beta Version*. I am running with a light grey background, using this mechanism.

[Clara Lou]

Note to self....

[ThePythonicCow]

Yes - doing a Google search with the search term site:freerepublic.com works surprisingly well. Sometimes I will see a brand spanking new post, just a few minutes old, with some odd word or name that I don't recognize, and try to Google search for it, only to come with a single hit -- that post I just read. Google was there before me!

[KarlInOhio]

Change! It’s even getting to FR.

Hmmmph! I liked the old days when you had to send in a deck of punch cards with your comment and got back a half ream of fanfold paper showing what everyone else said.

[John Robinson]

Yes! That feature is in initial development. There's an early preview on the beta site. The index is a bit stale, though, so don't expect to find anything recent.

[John Robinson]

Yes, bumped up the title font one size on the beta.

[Quix]

YEA! YEA! YEA!

Hope of retrieving some of the goodies, treasures from the mass.

Greatly appreciated.

I didn’t notice a preview pane . . . maybe eventually . . . so that don’t have to open msgs that are only worth deleting to find out they are only worth deleting???

Sure appreciate all your hard work.

Bless you and continued prayers for your Dad.

[John Robinson]

If you’re not seeing mountain time, you probably don’t have JavaScript enabled in your browser. We’re experimenting with the feasibility of using your browser to format the time stamp. It’s not a perfect solution, however, and the user preference option may have to return (still haven’t solved the time zone issues server-side— hence the current browser-side solution.)

[Miss Didi]

Thanks! How about the “replies” standing out more...I use that feature to find hopping threads and to click on a thread. Could it be farther to the right or in larger/colored font?

[John Robinson]

A later update will have a library of page styles you can choose from. The HTML is still in flux, so I haven’t given that feature much time to develop.

[Miss Didi]

John, I went on this “beta” site and the entire page has really large font. Is this how it will appear? So I went to adjust it in “View - Text Size” and then the page font becomes too small. :(

[John Robinson]

The more link on the sidebars is a little brain-damaged, it really should give you the next 15 articles, but instead it just gives you the latest articles (or whatever the block was configured to give.) That will be fixed.

[John Robinson]

Just the messages on the current page. I probably should make a note of that on the page.

[donna]

Thanks! That will be wonderful. No more snow blindness, LOL.

[John Robinson]

That's the direction I'm going. Just don't have the database ready for that.

You can still do something like that with the current architecture, by clicking the "Bookmark" link just under the article, and then making your bookmarks a sidebar block.

But the general idea of the bookmark function is to maintain a public list of links on your profile page, and you may or may not want to do that for all your "favorite" articles.

[John Robinson]

Yeah, I’m thinking about making an option (a “brevity” setting) that will show mail messages in full right in the folder/search results.

[TomGuy]

bumped up the title font one size on the beta.

Every time you bump the font size up or down, it plays havoc on the various browsers.

Now, for me, the beta site fonts are too huge to be readable.

I just finally got the old version set to where the fonts were somewhat tolerable. Now, the beta site blows that all to heck.

Now, the beta sidebar fonts are the same size as the regular article titles.

If I reset the browser font or IE Options font or Windows Desktop font settings to make the titles smaller, the other text shrinks to unreadably tiny.

[mc5cents]

Change! It’s even getting to FR. Seriously, thanks for the updating.

Yes, but alas what good is change without hope? Hope AND change is what we need.

[John Robinson]

I just now colored it on beta, but will probably keep the size because everything else on that line should probably remain small.

[John Robinson]

Hm, what browser version are you using? Having some trouble with font sizes on Internet Explorer 5, still haven’t worked those out.