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New UHub search box

By adamg on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 3:03pm

I'm slowly making my way towards some UI changes here, and one of the things that has long sucked is the search box in the upper right.

I've put in a new one that uses a pop up to bring up a search box rather than forcing you to type in really tiny letters in a really tiny box. It also works the same on both the desktop and mobile versions of the site as I try to improve the mobile version.

Please let me know what you think.

One thing I need to work on: If you click the Search link, the cursor should move right into the box so you can type, but it's not doing that right now, so you click on the link and then have to click again.

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Comments

By Jeff F on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 3:57pm.

..and, as you pointed out, since the cursor does not become a text entry cursor on its own, there's a lot more user-movement required. So legibility is not improved and time-to-use is longer. Both of these things would have to be addressed for me to feel this was better than the previous version.

#GoodUIDesignIsHard

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By adamg on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 4:20pm.

What browser are you using?

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By Jeff F on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 5:07pm.

Also...

- on Safari 12.1 same OS, the search feature requires Javascript be enabled, and the black pop-up box appears bigger, but there is no entry slip within which the cursor can be placed. Also, the dismiss button is a bunch of small dismiss icons. Weird. Here's a link to pic, (not that you need more to do, but I notice that the [img] tag isn't working for me now - it has in the past).

- pretty much the same for Safari on iOS 12.1.4 on an iPad Air

- Firefox on iOS 12.1.4 on iPad Air - slip comes up, allows text entry and dismisses (although dismiss-icon is small), but it's not any bigger than the original and the cursor, as you said, does not auto-locate to the slip).

- But..on an iPhone 6S with the same version of iOS(!) with both Safari and Chrome the slip comes up, allows text entry and dismisses (although dismiss-icon is small), but it's not any bigger than the original and the cursor, as you said, does not auto-locate to the slip).

- on the iPhone 6S with Firefox, the pop-up menu is bigger. But no auto-locate or cursor, and the search icon is out of alignment with entry slip - shifted about a dozen pixels up.

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By Gary C on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 5:09pm.

Win 7, Firefox:

Box is OK sized. Cursor doesn't auto-locate to the box. Text types OK.

Here's the problem: If I search say "Allston" the screen comes up that says "Search Results" and it's blank. If I then click the search button again, it auto-populates with "Allston" and actual results come up. Weird.

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By anon on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 5:34pm.

Same issue as Gary C on Windows 10/Firefox.

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By SwirlyGrrl on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 7:50pm.

Chrome/Win10

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By adamg on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 6:22pm.

Now to see if I can figure out that!

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By u-hub-fan on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 7:10pm.

If it's any comfort, I've yet to meet a blog search engine that worked right anywhere on the net.

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By certaindamage on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 6:07pm.

If you can work this into the Javascript code that opens the search pop-up, it should do the trick-

jQuery('.gsc-search-box').find('input[type="text"]:first').focus();

but it shouldn't run until the pop-up itself is fully visible (ie, the fade-in animation has completed).

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By adamg on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 6:22pm.

Thanks!

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By Friartuck on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 8:55pm.

So much has happened since AOL 2.0...

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By adamg on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 9:44pm.

I suspect there's some funkiness (the blank results pages) because the Google search query was being routed through the search code that comes with the site software (there was a good reason to do this, once, a long time ago). For now, I've changed that, so when you click on the Search icon at the top, you'll get to an actual search page that does not do this and returns results right away.

I still need to work on the formatting and the "focus" code that puts your cursor right in the search box when you click on the Search link, but at least search works again.

But please let me know if I'm wrong - and thanks for the help so far!

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By Ron Newman on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 9:51pm.

On Chrome I can't get it to pop up at all.

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By Ron Newman on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 11:01pm.

For instance, if I search for:

ll bean

I get lots of pages with names like "Page 66" and "Page 234" that don't contain the string that I searched for.

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By adamg on Wed, 03/27/2019 - 10:02pm.

Google is absolutely amazing at ferreting out pages that a normal person would not see and then indexing them. Like, I replicated your "ll bean" search and spotted a page with a URL something like universalhub.com/frontpage...

So I need to do a bunch of searches, find those things and then add them to the site robots.txt file, which Google looks at to determine what not to index. In the meantime, Google is, fortunately, good enough that the odds are what you're looking for will be among the top few resuts.

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