Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Forthcoming

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Happy Saturday, Slopers. Although the list of fixes, improvements, and new features for Slope is numbering about 70 right now (and increasing all the time, thanks to my poolside scribbles), I wanted to highlight a few specific items that are “top of list” right now.

+ True Real-Time Comments: The comments section has always been the most popular part of the blog. It is active enough, and auto-updating enough, to seem almost like a live group discussion. However, we have found some pretty nasty inefficiencies in the code, and it’s actually the comments system more than anything else that’s hammering the server CPUs so badly. Very soon after the launch, we dramatically reduced the speed that comments are auto-updated, just to give the servers breathing room. However, we are taking a completely different technical approach to this so that, when we’re done, comments will be virtually instantaneously updating and the CPU load will collapse to nothing. This is, trust me, priority ONE.

+ Mobile-Friendly Comments: As nice as the comments system looks on a desktop, it becomes a wreck on a tiny mobile screen. We are going to introduce a new “mode” for comments so that buttons are much smaller and the entire layout is more mobile-friendly.

+ SlopeCharts to SocialTrade and Comments: We already had the ability to “push” a SlopeChart into SocialTrade, but we broke it during the move. That’ll give fixed. On top of that, we’re going to add a feature to push a chart directly to the comments system as well.

If there is any other show-stopper problem you’ve got, I’d like to hear it, so just click here.

Right on the Home Page

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As we complete our first trading week with the new site, I wanted to make clear what is perhaps the most valuable tip of all: if you click at the top of any menu (that is, the menu header itself), it will instantly whisk you away to that section. This is such a handy tip that I’ve put it front and center, right there on the homepage, permanently.

homp

Designing the site in such a way as to “bury” the blog one level deeper was a very deliberate choice, because I wanted to force people out of their rut and explore other aspects of the site. It seems to be working, as SocialTrade and SlopeCharts use is climbing every day. However, I wanted to be clear that, for those of you who want to zip right to a specific place, this is one good way to do it.

headers

Tell Me Your Troubles

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What a weekend this has been. We’ve deployed the new site and have, over the course of 48 hours, improved the state of affairs from a “D-” to about a “B+”. I have a laundry list of stuff we have to fix, much of it tiny, but a few of the more obvious problems that I already know exist are:

  • Slope Daily Digest, which is emailed about an hour after the close each day, has stopped going out;
  • People reading Slope via RSS aren’t seeing it, since we need to update the link with Feedburner;
  • The “@” feature in comments isn’t sending the targeted user the comment via email;
  • Those of you who used to use your username (instead of email) to log in are unable to do so;

For those of you who have written me, clearing your cache has solved your problem 95% of the time, so please, have mercy, do that first (and log in) before you reach out to me with issues.

Setting that aside, however, if you’re still having trouble, or if you see something wrong, please write to me and let me know. We are fixing problems in terms of severity and importance, so please be patient. On the whole, I’m pretty happy with how things turned out, since this was like replacing the engines on an airborne jet.