Speculative Faith Upgraded: News, Feedback Forms, and Beyond
A week ago Speculative Faith added several new features, on our quest to be the premiere resource portal for Christian speculative-story exploration.
Readers may have already seen the features, and perhaps wondered if they were there all the time? Nope. These are new:
- A News section, for short blogs covering other interesting blogs, book or motion picture releases, or anything else.
- A new feedback form to Send News Tips of your own. (This actually went live as of yesterday.) What news should we cover? Fill out the form and let us know. We want to know about any Christian/speculative-related news, including new books, free books, marketing, Christian SF publisher news, recent movies, and amusing memes.
- Upgraded splash boxes that showcase any new content up front, wherever you journey on Speculative Faith.
- A fantastic enhanced Advanced Library Search. Look for it at the right of the Library splash box.
- Improved “lightbox” popup appearances for submitting novels and submitting novel reviews to our Library (along with the general site Suggestion Box). Soon we may have this same appearance for email-subscription signups.
- Swapped places for the top navigation bar and quote box, sitewide. It simply makes more sense to have the quote box on top.
- Improved sidebars to showcase all our recent content and customize based on what you’re reading.
Which new features seem helpful (or otherwise?). What would you like to see as Speculative Faith keeps growing?
Speculative Faith is not only a “blog.” As necessary as blogs are, readers and fans of epic stories need more than a blog. They need to find all Christian-speculative novels, gracious yet honest reviews, and in-depth genre explorations — all in one place. They need (to appropriate some evangelical-speak!) a resource portal, even a ministry. Lord willing, that is exactly what Speculative Faith will become. Speculative Faith is a resource portal to inspire exploring epic stories for God’s glory.
Exciting to see improvements. Looks good so far. Will let you know if I run into any snags or have any further feedback.
Keep up the good work!
On an 11″ screen using Google Chrome, there are a few issues. The top banner and newsbox is very large, taking up most of the screen. You have to scroll down to see a title for an article. The boxes also don’t scroll down any, so text inside of them can be cut off at the end including links to articles; the twitter feed at the bottom is a good example. The library drop down menu is off of the blue bar, and floating in space underneath it.
Also, please look at the library search bar at the top. Under “title,” I see the words drunk, dynasty, and priest listed as authors. Other than this not many issues.
I guess I might as well mention that there are a few minor issues when viewing the site on a computer running Linux (Firefox on Kubuntu). This update actually fixed some of the issues. The tab that used to say “SF Network” but now only says “Network” used to be too large for the tab’s width in the default font, but just “Network” fits. The word “Twitter” on the last tab gets truncated by the border of the box, though. The drop-down “Library” menu appears beneath the “Blog” menu, underneath the blue bar instead of on it. The text “Remember me” and “Register” on the log-in box are not visible, hidden behind the field for entering your email address.
All of these problems might only be due to the different fonts. I’ll have to check back on Windows’ Firefox later, but I don’t remember seeing these problems on Firefox or Chrome on Windows.
Anyways, this is an awesome and brilliantly designed and layed-out website. Now it’s a modern news/social outlet. Best site on the web! 🙂