I had grand plans this past weekend. I was going to put the finishing touches on the new crankyflier.com and flip the switch Saturday night. By Monday morning, all was going to be grand. Instead of that perfect scenario, however, I decided to role play as United. It wasn’t pretty. After some technical glitches, I had to revert on Sunday but not everyone had been switched back by as late as yesterday afternoon. (And by the way, if you sent an email to a crankyflier.com email address yesterday afternoon, um, that might not have reached me so please try again.) Tired of sitting in limbo, I decided to flip the switch again as soon as humanly possible. That means most of you should be seeing the new site now. Let me give you a tour.
First I need to be clear up front. The basic structure and mission of crankyflier.com is not changing. I will continue to post on the regular schedule and except on rare occasion, I will remain the only person posting. I’m not trying to morph the site into something new and different. I just wanted a cleaner look that will give you, the readers, some nice benefits.
Redesigned Homepage
Not everyone will love this, but the homepage will now no longer have the full text of each article on it. Instead, it will have endless scrolling with excerpts from each article. Just click and you’ll be able to read the one you want. The idea was to make it better for people who want to browse and find the articles that interest them most. If you preferred the old way, then I would highly suggest subscribing via RSS or email. Both are free and will deliver the daily content right to you. No extra clicks required.
Easier to Read in a Bigger Content Area
I’ve tried to use a better font that’s easier to read. In addition, the content area is wider meaning that you’ll have less scrolling to read everything.
More Prominent Visuals
Some of you love my images, and some of you hate them. Regardless, they’re going to be more prominent now. Featured images will appear on the homepage from each post. And in the post itself, the images will be 30 percent wider thanks to the expanded content area. That means I can my images way more awesome. See what you missed out on in my American/US Airways merger post because of the restricted content size?
You’ll also notice a new set of logo images in the header. Don’t worry. The original logo is still there, but I’ve added 5 new ones (all photos I’ve taken myself over the last few years) and they will rotate when you reload.
Better for Mobile
This new look uses responsive web design. That means that as you shrink or grow your window, the site scales with you. If you get small enough, it goes into a mobile mode that works very well on your phone. Play with your browser and you’ll see how it works.
Faster
You probably had trouble with my site loading slowly before. Or if you logged on the evening, it might have even timed out. You can thank my old host for that. I’ve ditched that host and moved over to Pagely. These guys are designed for WordPress (which I use as my blogging platform), and it should be much faster.
Send Your Feedback
I have a few minor bugs to work through still (tables are messed up, for example), but of course I couldn’t test this on every browser and platform out there. So if you see any issues, please email me with the browser and device you’re using along with the problem. It will help me to improve this as we go.
If you had any trouble with the site over the last few days, I apologize. Hopefully it’s all working fine for you now. Thursday, it’s all back to normal here and we can finally focus on the airlines again.
