Dinosaur Toy Blog changes

[Gwangi]

I have the unpainted Muttaburrasaurus and will take pictures when I get the chance, unless someone beats me to it. There are better photographers than me around here but if they don't step up then I can  do it. Now the question becomes, what newer figure should compliment it?

[Concavenator]

Do we want strictly "Modern", accurate figures for the banner, or could more classic or stylized figures be nominated too?

I'd prefer modern accurate figures if you ask me. Or at least new figures. For example, when it comes to the current banner, yes I would like a change (it's been 3 years now, isn't it?) but I like the idea behind it, even if not all figures there are accurate, they're modern (they were new by 2020). I prefer that approach over the retro/awesomebro/modern one. If we include a figure we now consider "modern and accurate", how will we feel about that figure in some years from now on? Imagine we had followed this approach in 2014 and included the CollectA Carcharodontosaurus because it was brand new then and a lot of us could have considered it "modern and accurate" by that time. 2021 and we have the GR Toys, PNSO and some people even the Dino Hazard one. So the "modern" figure on the banner would turn out to be "retro" in a shorter amount of time than what you'd think.

Updating the forum banner with new releases adds a sense of dynamism to the forum that you could consider "a breath of fresh air".

This discussion is for the blog banner, not the forum one. The blog banner only has two figures. I agree that the forum banner should be recent releases.

Thank you, I didn't realize.

Well yeah, I'm on board for a change for the blog banner too. I would prefer them to be modern and accurate figures too but I wouldn't mind a retro vs modern themed one either. In that case, I think having 2 figures of the same species would work better than having 2 figures of different species. For example, a scaly and a feathered Deinonychus or Velociraptor could work well.

[Halichoeres]

[Fembrogon]

I have the unpainted Muttaburrasaurus and will take pictures when I get the chance, unless someone beats me to it. There are better photographers than me around here but if they don't step up then I can  do it. Now the question becomes, what newer figure should compliment it?

How about these? I cleaned them up from a couple of archive photos I had.

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[DinoToyForum]

@Fembrogon Thanks! I'll give it a try...

[DinoToyForum]

Here's a quick mock up. What do you think?



The text is slightly different because I'm using GIMP instead of Photoshop, and the emboss filter isn't quite as good.

[DinoToyForum]

By the way, there is a way to have lots of headers and randomise them. Which is helpful if we want to have more than one pair of creatures.

[Baryonyx]

  looks fantastic!! Thanks!

[Fembrogon]

I like it, I think it's very good!
The idea of having multiple headers sounds fun, too; I've always enjoyed little details like that in websites, but some of the sites I frequent who used to do that removed said trait.    I'm all for the DTB applying it.

[Gwangi]

It looks great! And I like that the Mutta appears to approve too with it's thumb up.

[DinoToyForum]

Okay, I've uploaded the new header to the DinoToyBlog. Thanks everyone for the discussion and especially those who provided the images.

[Thialfi]

Ohhh I love the new banner - revolving banners sound like a lot of fun too!

[Faelrin]

Getting an obtrusive ad banner at the bottom of the forum, on my laptop browser (firefox), that I have to click to close. On mobile it's on the top (chrome based browser, but similar problem). Not sure where to go to report ads anyways, so mentioning it here. Anyone else having this issue?

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[DinoToyForum]

Getting an obtrusive ad banner at the bottom of the forum, on my laptop browser (firefox), that I have to click to close. On mobile it's on the top (chrome based browser, but similar problem). Not sure where to go to report ads anyways, so mentioning it here. Anyone else having this issue?

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Thanks for alerting me. I haven't placed an ad there, so it looks like Adsense autoads is doing that. I'll see if I can remove this now. I did recently adjust the position of ads on the Dinosaur Toy Blog, but that seems to have inadvertently turned the ad into a distracting video (for me, at least) so I'm trying to fix that too.

[Halichoeres]

I hadn't noticed before, but the Dromaeosaurus looks like it could be applauding? Or tenting its fingers nefariously, maybe.

[DinoToyForum]

I've overhauled the Authors section of the Dinosaur Toy Blog. There used to be separate author pages with biographies and separate author archives, but these are now combined, with the biographies now appearing at the top of the Author archives. This means the author links on review pages now lead to the author biography + archive. The appearance of https://dinotoyblog.com/about-the-authors/ has also changed, with the avatars there selected by (or to be selected by) the authors. And all of the old Author pages have been deleted. And authors can now edit their blog biographies themselves.

One outstanding thing is to order the author archives by date, so I'm trying to work out how to do that without reordering the other archives (like categories and tags) which need to remain alphabetical.

[Halichoeres]

Thanks, that streamlines things!

[Concavenator]

@dinotoyforum did you forget to update the "Dinosaur Toy Blog" part of your signature or did you leave the older banner intentionally?

[DinoToyForum]

@dinotoyforum did you forget to update the "Dinosaur Toy Blog" part of your signature or did you leave the older banner intentionally?

I just forgot! I've updated it now, thanks for the reminder!

[DinoToyForum]

Reviews in author archives are now ordered by date, while reviews in categories and genus tags are still ordered alphabetically.