Slashdot Mirror
CNET News.com Turns 7
dmehus writes "Just as Google celebrated its 5th birthday last week, which was covered by Slashdot, I thought it would be equally appropriate to point out that tech news darling CNET News.com celebrated its 7th birthday this past week. To mark that occasion, its Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh wrote an article, in which he reflects on their founding slogan of 'Tech News First' and their commitment to that going forward. He also announces a brand new redesign that was unveiled yesterday. To that I'd add, here's to another seven more! Thoughts or opinions, anyone?"
I've learned to take CNets news with a grain of salt, since many times they just seem to editorialize stories and add in useless comments etc.
To be in business 7 years is a great accomplishment though, and my congratulations go out to them.
They have com.com as a domain too... Reminds me of how I always wanted to buy dotcomat.com ..so my email address could be
dotcom@dotcomat.com..
They removed the investor end of the page it seems, making it seemingly unfriendly to the end user/viewer.
After pushing it for so long as a key component to thier "tech news" package, I wonder if its been thrown on the back burner, or if it was a mistake.
You can still get to it @ http://investor.news.com/
-mason.j
Wow, CSS, XHTML, and and lots of div tags. Doesn't validate, but they're better off than they used to be, at least they made an attempt I guess.
To bad they ruin it with static width pages. You'd think they'd know this after 7 years.
In the spirit of promoting the Slashdot effect, I decided to visit cnet.com after having dismissed their site as rubbish. Well, as it turns out, I found an interesting article where an EFF attorny suggests that universities obfuscate student IP addresses by shuffling them to fend off the the RIAA. Any site that posts that sort of content is okay by me! So to you, cnet.com, may you grow in our dismal economy!
I used to frequent CNet every day back around 1999, and I found them to be a timely, valuable resource. But something happened in early 2001, and they began to go downhill rapidly. The site design became cluttered and severely commercialized, to the point where it became difficult to get a page to load properly - even over a DSL connection - because of all the junk slapped on it.
The sluggish performance and cluttered pages would be worth trudging through if there were some solid content behind them. Their hardware and software reviews were once top notch, but now I can find better elsewhere - Tom's Hardware, for example, or a slew of specialized sites (silentpcreview, for example, or mini-itx). Even the amateur reviews at Epinions or Amazon are more informative (taken in aggregate).
Frankly, I'm amazed CNet has lasted this long.
If you want to compare the new site design to the old one check out the archived copy provided by Archive.org Wayback Machine.
Or why not check out some of the previous designs... Nov 17, 1999 or why not go right back to Dec 23, 1996.
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*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
I found CNET News.com to be rather biased towards Microsoft early on by running stories favorable towards the company. (often ignoring news critical of Microsoft)
Wow... That makes them the anti-Slashdot! If packets from Slashdot and CNet ever collide, the Internet will blow up in a huge blast of photons!
What, did someone break a mirror, AGAIN?
A static/fixed width layout isn't a bad thing, depending on when it's used. And I'm sure the people at CNet thought about the pros and cons of a liquid layout in their design process.
For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.
It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.
As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot. org
:)
Not that I care about as it displays fine
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One by one the penguins steal my sanity...