Common Problems and Solutions:
The site looks awful on smartphones, especially Android.
Yeah, I still need to work on that. A nice, slick, mobile version of the site is on my to-do list.
The stock chart takes several seconds to appear.
If you are the first person to load a company's stock chart since the last market close, the updated data may not yet be in the database. It needs to be pulled from my data provider and processed, which takes time. As this site becomes more popular, a smaller percentage of visitors will experience this problem.
The chart loading time is rarely slower than typical page loading times for most other websites, but it can cause confusion because I use a technology called AJAX that does not provide user feedback when the site is still being updated.
The stock is up, but the chart shows red.
The day's change and the stock plot direction are measured differently. The day's change is the difference between the previous day's close price and the current day's last trade price. The stock plot color is based on the difference between the current day's opening price and the current day's last trade price.
So, if the stock closed yesterday at $100, opened today at $120, but is currently at $110, the stock will be up 10%, but the stock plot color will be red because the stock fell since the market open.
Some stock charts use other colors for this type of situation, but traditional newspaper stock charts only had two colors: white for up and black for down. I may add additional colors in the future, but only if it reduces user confusion.
In general, the web page layout doesn't look right.
This site requires a modern web browser. I still get visitors using outdated versions of Internet Explorer, such as IE 8. The current version of Internet Explorer is version 11. I also occasionally get visitors running Firefox 3.6. As of late 2014, the current version of Firefox is 33. Newer web browsers do a much better job than older ones of adhering to the current Web standards.
If you are still using Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP, you really should switch browsers to Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer on Windows XP is no longer getting security patches from Microsoft, which makes IE 8 users abnormally vulnerable to malware.
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