(off-topic) What is wrong with Coderwall? They're worse than Google+ and the stupid "Join Google+" bar... If someone wants to join, they will. No need to rub it in their face. At least have the decency to show a close button...
In case it's not clear, I'm talking about the stupid, 105px tall black bar that asks you to "Join Coderwall" when you start to scroll
Founder here...we have been experimenting on variations of a bar with the goal that someone that stumbles upon a pro tip like this one can discover more about Coderwall. I agree that it looks a little big, intentions were not to be obnoxious - we'll be fixing that.
Any time a developer drops one of these "popup" spam div's into my page while I'm on their site I block it using Adblock Plus.
If there are enough people like me that get tired of seeing this particular piece of visual spam it gets added to the list of elements that are blocked for all Adblock Plus users.
The lesson site designers and developers really need to start learning is STOP DOING THIS. Put a link in your nav, or at the top of the page.
Turning hover on for everything is annoying. Crap popping up on your page when I use the scrollbars is annoying. I really don't care how clever you think it is. It's just damned annoying.
While you're at it - on 13'' screen and 2 year old machine your site is absolutely unreadable and unusable. There is a little bit of text in the middle and vast swaths of space with strange blurred colors occupying most of my visible space. Then the black bar. Selecting text takes forever (some JS tricks? I dunno?).
Generally speaking I find arguments about usability from someone who can't present their own blog a little dubious.
it seriously does not matter. the pixel sizes are hardcoded so it'll look unreadable on any small screen, your particular OS does not matter. my resolution is 1440x900 if this helps.
Alternatively, if you want something that's always there, you could put it on the side.
One of the seldom talked about problems with floating headers/footers is that they break page up/down. Hitting space bar now takes you slightly too far to keep reading uninterrupted.
When I'm reading an article (on anything other than my iDevices or Mac, as they all thankfully have 'Reader' that show a no-bullshit version of the article), I like to press 'space bar' to go to next page. It just drives me nuts when I have to 'press space bar, press up arrow 4 times' just because some designer thought it's clever and nice to have a go with a reincarnation of navbar iframe (that everyone agreed were heinous)... What the fuck is the purpose of a giant bar that shows some silly social icons? You already have that damn 'like' button on 20 other places on your web2.0 page... Just look at TheNextWeb: vhttp://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/07/20/apple-gives-developer... (you have to scroll a bit to see the "feature")
I noticed because I wanted to click to the front page (coderwall.com), but when I scrolled back to the top, the banner was covering the 'coderwall' logo/link/branding. Had their been a button to close it, it would have been preferable.
In case it's not clear, I'm talking about the stupid, 105px tall black bar that asks you to "Join Coderwall" when you start to scroll