Slashdot Mirror
Designer on Slashdot Overhaul Plans
EdwardianDandy writes "Web designer Khoi Vinh, whose firm Behavior is responsible for the redesign of the Onion, argues on publish.com that an upcoming contest to overhaul Slashdot's look will yield interesting results, but the outcome will suffer because the underlying architecture is off limits." Normally I don't post stuff "About" Slashdot here since I find meta naval gazing very boring, but this article has many good points about architecture and design, even if his whole premise is based on a contest that we haven't spent more than about 5 minutes thinking about, and is mostly just meant to be a fun way for users to contribute themes to Slashdot. If Khoi wants to enter the contest, we'll consider his designs along with everyone else's. (I'm sure we can't afford him tho). And if he (or anyone) wants to make changes more substantial than cosmetic CSS, I'd consider them too. The upcoming Slashdot Redesign contest is intended to be more about design than architecture, but good ideas are good ideas.
A small request: whatever we finally decide to do, let's keep Slash Light.
"it's now possible for any enterprising designer to develop a new, production-ready (or nearly ready) 'skin' for the site completely on her own."
I told you guys! Once we shaped up and went CSS the females would be all over us! I'm talking SKIN!
Mind showing off your work-in-progress?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
How old is the current design? Is this the originial design from whenever this site started? Enlighten me!
I find the new Onion design too busy and hard to navigate. The old design was simple, clean and the Infographcs and American Voices were easier to read. Maybe that's just my opinion...
That's not printed on the paper. That's proof that your mother was right. You'll go blind doing that. It always starts with the yellow grid...
When did the Navy get involved with Slashdot?
I hope this guy keeps his hands off of /. because the new Onion design gives me a headache. Swapping a clean, streamlined design for a USA-Today ripoff isn't my idea of progress.
Seriously, this guy needs something else to worry about.
As I see it, the founders didn't decree anything: There are rules to any contest. And given how much backend work el founders probably wanted to do ( ie: none. If it ain't borked, don't fix it ), this makes perfect sense.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Please stay away from Flash and whiz-bang javascript features. Nice and minimal, efficient delivery of content over purty visual bloat, please.
is ridiculously obnoxious to view. Everything's too compressed and diffifult to find. There's nothing eye-catching or particularly aesthetically pleasing about the site any more. Also, it's so homogenized that I don't feel inclined to wade through all the same-sized font headlines to find funny stories. It frustrated me so much that I subscribed to the printed version instead. Unless /. is planning on going print, let's not do anything drastic...
It's far more cluttered than it used to be. Not every online paper needs to look like USA Today (or whatever).
Also, does anyone like the Salon.com re-design? Almost exactly the same problem...
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
So he's the one responsible for befouling my precious Onion.
:(
I realize the debate over homogeneity and efficiency of content/ad presentation is one that will never die, but there's something to be said about the sentimentality attached to site layouts. It's like that old pub you love going to getting remodeled with gear from Ikea or something. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it also doesn't feel right, either.
The Onion can afford him but, Slashdot can't? Who's making off with Slashdot's cash?
Naval gazing? Taco finds looking at ships boring?
Why do people always make excuses? "I don't usually..." "I don't mean to disturb..." I don't want to butt in..." and yet they always charge on in.
Why the hell do I read this site anymore? More over, why do I post my pearls for the cretins. Someone will probably answer to tell me that it's spelt Perl...
When I stopped being a nub and actually edited my prefences and figured out what everything is, I made /. good for me and now I have no problems or confusion. :)
In effect, the site's information architecture *IS* up for redesign? possibly? thus negating the limiting factors of the original contest announcement? I agree with the article for the most part, in that good design is generally reliant for usability upon a solid foundation of content structuring underneath, but I think that in Slashdot's case, a hell of a lot of good could come from just scrapping and rewriting the "look and feel" from the ground up. Setting aside complaints about timeliness and originality of content lately, I think that Slashdot's main problem is that if anything, the information it contains is TOO categorized and divided. You could spend an hour just familiarizing yourself with all the various "sections", and that's not even considering shit like "Ask Slashdot" and other regular types of submissions/articles with their own special little names that would confound a newbie to the point of exasperation. There's no good way to simplify a juggernaut like slashdot, there is simply too much out there, and it has too large a community for any 180 degree changes in how it works. I think the best that can be done is a dramatic re-think of the UI, and a reliance on site search to get at the older innards.
Meta navel gazing IS boring.
This brings many things into sharp focus. Lack of ethical caching of small sites. Lack of basic story duplication review. Lack of basic grammar review. Lack of basic journalistic fact-checking. Troubling comments that charge karma backlash to those who defy the editors. Lack of awareness that Slashdot is expected by its subscribers and would-be subscribers to behave like the professional corporate concern which it is, and not an unpaid hobby blog which it may have been in the distant past.
Come on, Taco. Some regular "navel gazing" is how things improve over time. Is Slashdot worth so little to you?
[
I think that /. should include a new background that has a random pattern of sub-1mm yellow dots in it, for the tinfoil hat people so they can feel safe about printing articles posted here.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
less of the need to page down with our new whiz-bang wider monitors/multihead rigs nowadays? 2 columns or 3? Not too cluttered (think TheRegister).
Just a thought
In spite of what this site looks like and acts, this site is run by paid professionals and paid by a for-profit company.
So why in the world would you need readers to submit redesigns for you? At the company I work for, we wouldn't ask clients to help us with our business for free. It's not productive and is just being cheap.
If Microsoft or any-big-evil corp ran a contest with a negligible prize to help line their own pockets, they'd get ripped to shreds on slashdot. Taco, stop being a cheapass and pay for professional designers.
he's one of those his/her alternation nutters:
And thanks to the well-advertised wonders of CSS, it's now possible for any enterprising designer to develop a new, production-ready (or nearly ready) 'skin' for the site completely on her own.
i have absolutely nothing of interest to say about his opinions on slashdot's competition, but he's a nutter
The third link is an ASP site. Beware when clicking on the click, it may already have been "redesigned" by the time you get to it!
Text-only website, yea!
I can read slashdot just fine. If it isn't broke, then don't fix it. I only wish The Onion had taken this advice, because their flash-based design is nauseating.
One of the things I like about this website is the simplicity in viewing it and I really wouldn't want to see much changed. The only thing I would say to change is to kill some of the white space between posted articles and user comments, but that is really a minute nitpick... Slashdot has enough of a following that changing the site won't hurt numbers of visitors IMO but hopefully if they decide to go with a new spread it won't wind up being visually unappealing...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Here I am posting a comment and I can't view the story I'm commenting on. That's ridiculous. And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot because the most important information is buried among a lot of trivia in the FAQs.
If Slashdot were a person it would wear taped together glasses, a pocket protector and floods.
News for nerds indeed.
Insert witty sig here.
So yesterday I was at home trying to post a comment and I got the following:
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has
temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the
timeout corner . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down.
If you think this is unfair, please email moderation@slashdot.org with your
MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "fbc83eaaddf909965a32494c3cf14021" and "
0681b6883c7b099b59889c08cb34313a" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP
number "68.xxx.xxx.xxx http://68.xxx.xxx.xxx/>" and your username "SumDog".
So I emailed them telling them the problem. I was a subscriber, with decent Karma and I don't troll (although I bet this will be modded as a troll sadly). The response I got was:
> On 10/17/05, Robert Rozeboom wrote:
>>
>> It looks like you share this subnet with a troll, sorry.
The next day, I am still unable to post from home. I have to ssh into work and use lynx to post a comment. I e-mailed him again and got this response:
I;m sorry but I can't unblock your subnet.
Again from Robert Rozeboom. I actually support slashdot, bought a subscription (yea I know it's only $10) and I can't post from home because someone who uses a Comcast cable modem is a troll?! What the fuck?!
They don't bother to check the individual user, but instead ban an entire sub net. There were several comments I wanted to post yesterday but couldn't, because I didn't want to sit with a damn ssh terminal in lynx retyping my user name and password for each comment (I had cookies turned on in Lynx, but it didn't remember my authentication).
If I had done something wrong, I could understand. If there was some way I could fix the problem I would. But even if I unplug my cable modem and get a new IP, it will still likely be on the same subnet. I can't change providers, I don't have DSL or any other broadband in my area (not to mention the reconnection and setup fees are insane unless they're running a special offer)
Before slashdot worries about polishing up the look and feel of their site, they should go back and fix underlying problems with the code, maybe even add spell-check and require users to type in words from images (a.k.a reverse turing test) to prevent abuse from bots.
Now the Annapolis Grads are ready to make their move...
Best Slashdot Co
Don't *ever* change to a format like the Onion. Ever. I beg you.
Not to mention the fact that they are media tarts, placing an full page advert on the link, probably only because of the slashdot effect. The format is a mess.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
It's a variation of stomich pondering.
What the fuck is up with people who make the underlines of hyperlinks DISAPPEAR when you rollover them?! It's one of the stupidest things you can do, design-wise, with a web site. Just change the colour of the text if you must, but don't go changing the friggin' underline for no reason.
Oh, and the reply box is too tall now. Why have the Name and URL info on separate lines? Hell, even displaying the URL info in the reply box makes no sense: I know what site I put in there, why bother displaying it?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
A la Kuro5hin.
From the Slashdot story: "... the underlying architecture is off limits."
Why is the architecture off limits?
Is something wrong with Slashdot as it is? It's quick, easy on the eyes (while still not being boring)... what else do we need?
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Suggestions:
Make the page load quickly, it should be easy to read and possibly have the ability to change colours randomly or manually. Maybe have a scheme where the background is black and the text is yellow/green/white?
The top and left menus may need to be overhauled with more concise headers and more descriptive subsections.
Maybe have 2 kinds of polls, one is a fun poll and another more scientific poll? Poll on things that might matter such as preferences of computer equipment/brands/configurations? Poll on subjects that are timely and forsee future trends in the industry.
Have a bigger links section to reference guides and useful tools.
And finally, whatever you do, do not make it look like this:
http://channel9.msdn.com/
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Am I the only one who thinks the shitty look and feel of slashdot is part of the site? Making the design more up-to-date might detract from it...
It has a bunch of javascript links that won't work for users who refuse to run javascript. 'statshot' is now a javascript link. That was done.. why? I'm sure it must be doing something *REALLY* cool (besides just displaying the item), right?
The links along the left side of the page have no labels or descriptions.
So I'd like to send out a big "DUH" to the web 'designer' and to theonion.
They call themselves "the definitive authority on web publishing and print", and yet their own site uses teeny tiny 10px fonts? Free clue: design is about balancing form and function. When you use tiny fonts, you sacrifice function. If you forget the balance, it's not design, just art wanking. A 10px font size for the main body of text is not acceptable for something to qualify as well designed.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
So long as there's a picture of cowboy neal's pondering visage next to every story (throw out those damn colourful icons).
e al_pokemon2.highlight.jpg
g
i se%20Vapormeet%20(Michigan)/cowboyneal_playing_gui tar.jpg
Here are a few to template:
http://panamaus.org/gallery/albums/e2misc/cowboyn
Cowboy Breakfast
http://everything2.com/images/incoming/FuPater.jp
Cowboy neal salesman protection stance
http://doulopolis.net/albums/E2%20Photos/Hollanda
'Good Times'
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
Anyone who has used Winamp 5 , knows how easy it is to change the entire theme of the player.
I expect slashdot to have such a wide array of themes to color to choose from, so that each user can see slashdot in the way he/she likes to , instead of complaining about colours "hurting eyes"
Why does yahoo do this
Pretty please with sugar on top!??!
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Just switch Slashdot over to the best CMS out there.... WebGUI: The Web Done Right!
This is not a paid advertisement.
The ASCII-goatse guys need to be IP-banned for life. The GNAA guys need to get a life. The "overrated/underrated" metamod loophole needs to be closed. Storys need to be checked for duplicates, at least a week back. Summaries should summarize. Third grade rules of grammar and spelling should be observed in summaries. Storys should be assigned to the category they belong to. Corel cache links should be supplied for sites that obviously can't take the strain - particularly if they have shown that they can't in the past. Roland Pipaquele (sp) and the Amazon recommendation link trolls should be executed. Storys should be accepted/rejected in a timely manner, and we shouldn't be seeing people posting "I submitted this 20 hours ago, and was rejected".
I could go on, but I'm sure I've said enough already to be scored a troll-for-life, so I'll quit now.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So if we let Khoi go ahead, we will have to click "skip ad" everytime we enter too?
The onion is unreadable anyway, but I guess that is the trend: Make it unreadable so people will accidentilly click on the ads?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Now slashdot serves up tons and tons of pages, the threading and what not works fine, it's not the sexiest looking in the world but in what regard that you care about is it not "sturdy?" I mean I don't even read but a handful of the top rated comments anyways, this isn't the AP wire news or something really important. It's like these guys all went to the same consultant's guide to selling class, I've never dealt with one, even on payroll (full time employee, no overtime) that didn't up-scope every damn project from cutting graphics and mastering some production colors into some major overhaul of the look and feel and ultimately even behavior of the product. Seriously, I've seen the simple easy money, easy release turned into a bloody nightmare multiple times.
Then they spin it, "well, I can do graphics design and the artwork but I'm really a 'designer'"
You just want to dust off the website, maybe step it up a little to keep up with the Jones' and the next thing you know you're buying new servers, investing in some new technologies, buying a copy of robohelp (cause I need help with
I'm using a modest notebook.. AMD K6, 500~ mhz, 192 ram, on board graphics etc.. Not super modern, but fast enough for my purposes. Theres no reason why browsing a TEXT based forum should be so friggin slow.. Before the change, scrolling through the comments went as fast as I could push the key. Now, there's a 1-2 second pause each time I hit pgup/pgdn. Maybe theres some option somewhere to bring it back to normal, or maybe slashdot is gonna start selling super-premium blazing fast accelerated service for only 19.95 a month - browse slashdot at lightning fast speed!
Ugh.
Agreed, I used to read The Onion religiously, but now I don't bother anymore. The new site is a disaster, and it's all about generating revenue through obtrusive ads. The "new" Onion is a corporate shill. I'd be ashamed to be associated with that site, let alone advertise that I created that trainwreck of a perfectly good (great!) site.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Rob- how's the porsche running? By the way, thanks again for the beer and pizza at the original slashdot party!!
No. XML is a set of syntax rules, not a document format itself. When people say "XML" when the context implies a document format, they invariably mean "an ad-hoc data format I've just made up on the spot that uses XML syntax". It's meaningless data. <myspecialheading> means nothing to anybody but you. Everybody knows what <h1> means though. Do Google apply XSLT? Do all browsers? No and no. They are left with the XML, which means nothing.
If you really want to manipulate your pages with XSLT, publish XHTML so that at least there's a decent fallback and your documents actually mean something on their own without being translated into whatever format your XSLT produces.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
In normal reading, every non-top comment has two links: parent, and reply. This makes sense.
When you click reply, the comment is shown again above the input textbox, which still makes sense.
Below the comment, there's one link. And this link says: reply.
Now why should I want to use the reply link, when my reply form is already right before my nose?
Noreover, why remove the link to parent (which, unlike the reply link, I actually would use from time to time)?
Not that it's a big problem, not clicking a pointless link is more than easy, and if I want to get to the parent, it's just one extra mouse click (once on the comment number to get a normal display of the message, where I then have the parent link). It's just that it looks stupid to me every time again to see a pointless reply link on the reply page, while obviously the coders have done some work to remove the (actually useful) parent link.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Nonsense. /. maybe losing its edge but it's not losing it to digg by the looks of it.
./ now sometimes only gets 200 replies to an article whereas dig seems to have trouble managing more than 20.
That article you have linked to is simply a lot of people parroting "Yeah, digg is cool" and the other articles I have read do the same thing along the lines of "Yeah, what the article said - that was cool man". They say that
Where is the debate ? Where are the interesting viewpoints ? What is the point ?
Is it just me, or does everyone think that the redesign of the Onion is horrible. The stuff you like to read is made really small and the stuff you don't care about is really big. There is way too much stuff on the screen and a lot of the good stuff is below the fold.
It's not just that people are used to the old and are mad that it changed, it's that the new design really really sucks.
Anyway, regarding TFA, that was the biggest load of "Web Designer" horse crap ever shoveled into HTML. Slashdot has been ASS UGLY since 1997. Yet, it's been hugely successful. Why is this? Gosh, it COULDN'T be because of the CONTENT--could it? Not only has Slashdot continued to provide what it's here to provide, it's remained remarkably stable, UI-wise.
"Rethinking" the architecture is daft. Slashdot has a codebase built to encourage good comments and hide bad ones, but to accept everything that's not scripted spam. That's the architecture. "Rethinking" that is like "rethinking" the design of the nuclear reactor in a submarine while crusing at 20 knots 800 feet down.
Please keep your Web Designer hands off Slashdot, thanks.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The Onion makes my eyes water.
*bdumTSH*
... says digg.com ...
Slashdot needs a theme that is very neutral... and looks like a legitimate business website...that an IT person might visit. this turquois stuff really stands out at work... shooot... here comes the boss....
How can you not afford it, Malda? 60% of the stories on the front page are advertisments, there's ad's all over the page and the content itself (unless you're a subscriber, in which case you're getting more money).
Did you perhaps really mean that you know he'd do a better job, but you're not -willing- to spend the money on it?
Yeah, TacoBoy... clean up your act. Parent is correct about changes that need to be made. A redesign, while academically intersting, is not going to stop the drain circling. Listen to your posters... this place has become teh suck.
Who's been fucking up this website. Now I know who to blame for all it's recent annoying crap.
Probably because I'm an amature but the articles linkage between 'skin' and information architecture is unclear. Without mentioning the functionality he'd like to play with, he comes off like a graphic designer who dips his toe in php every now and then but wants to be running the show. Which reminds me of half the graphic designers I've worked with. The job is, for instance, a shopping cart - and they've done some serious thinking about SQL (or scarier, Actionscript or OOP) so there's an hour or two wasted as they pontificate and then I go home and figure it out. I think it's bred in ad agencies where everyone is trying to build an empire.
I wanted to pay a guy back by waiting till the end of the project and then saying 'I have some ideas about the fonts' but I'm too nice (lazy)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I have no real motivation to read this guy's article since I just tried to see the onion's new site and was told that my browser isn't supported. It used to work just fine, so from my perspective Khoi Vinh is responsible for making the Onion inaccessible. Thanks for nothing, Khoi.
Being able to view submitted and pending stories and able for the comunity to vote for them. I don't know about the rest of you but there were many times when I posted a story that got rejected that the next week it was accecepted by someone else and it was a major thread. Also we will be able to find dupes quicker.
Secondly being able to edit your posts after you post it for spelling and grammar mistakes and just have the gammar nazis just send you a private message with the spelling and grammar mistakes for you to change if it makes sense.
Third More moderation options with different values. Like Over and Under Rated should have 1/2 point taken because it slips threw the meta moderation.
Common non moderators can put points on a message to so moderators can see what other people like or dislike and they can make a decision based off of that.
Moderators should know what metamoderators did to their moderation so they can reevaluate their actions.
Mod points shouldn't have a limit (while karma does) but the amount of moderation should go up logarmithicly. So you can get moderations of 6 and 7 but the higer it goes the more moderation it will take to get that high.
Over and Under rated messages should not be an option for unmoderated messages. Because they were not rated.
The point of most of my suggestions is to incorage positive posting and not rusing to get first posts early. Many time the comments are worth more then the stories but they are treated like they normal static to them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Get Kupu! http://kupu.oscom.org/ , or Fckeditor http://www.fckeditor.net/ , or any of the Javascript text box replacements. I don't write emails with a telegraph key, and I don't build PNG images with MS paint. Replace these awful text boxes with something less painless.
A face lift and interface switch is great, but really some of these features need to step into the new century.
Erik
Off topic and not a suggested solution in your case. Slashdot should do something to allow you a paid subscriber to post message ... but ... you might find that elinks or w3m have better cookie management and both will also run on the command line.
Man, that redesign of The Onion is the classic case of how to fuck up a perfectly good website:
It doesn't fit in a regular sized window and has a terribly confusing layout. There is no consistant feel to the page, it's just an ugly pile of shit.
POKE 36879,8
That pretty much sums up the problem here: design is architecture and architecture is design.
Whatever "design" is done to slashdot should recognise that the main attraction of the site is text. Not just a few words, but loads of it. Long, dense paragraphs of it. Given that, the design should be simple, clean and appealing, and should let the text occupy most of the screen. It should get out of the way and let the readers read.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Meta naval gazing can be quite entertaining. New York City offers many opportunities for naval gazing that are popular and lend themselves to meta naval gazing, including the U.S.S. Intrepid, water taxis, the Staten Island ferry, and the annual Fleet Week celebration. Last weekend I drove by the Intrepid, and I was delighted to see people viewing the ship. Whenever I ride the ferry, I watch people observing ships as much as I gaze directly at the ships themselves. Meta naval gazing often relieves the pressures of direct naval gazing, since the best seats are always taken, and its easier to stand in the back and watch other people watch ships. CmdrTaco should open his heart and experience the joy of casting glances at those admiring seafaring vessels.
I'm sure we can't afford him tho
Which is why you are going to make it a "fun contest" for your readers. That way you get a new design for the price of one subscription/t-shirt (that was also designed by a reader who didn't get paid. Money, that is).
Rob - you are right that "navel gazing" is bad. But looking down and saying "Dayum - I need to lay off the beer and do some sit-ups" is not.
/. servers could see from that.
Being so focused upon your navel that you DO NOTHING about it is bad. But stepping back once in a while and saying "now, how can I make things better - anybody have any good advice", then implementing that advice is the only way to improve.
For example - what if you added extra CSS classes to comments, reflecting the moderation adjectives applied and the moderation level - such as
<li class="comment, level_5, karma_bonus, insightful, interesting, overrated">
Then, without a server fetch, I could change my displayed comment threshold just by changing my CSS. Think about how much savings the
You could even add the zoo modifiers, then I could have my friends posts highlighted by changing the background, again, without a server fetch.
In short, Rob - if you put more of the information the back-end has into the generated HTML, then that would increase the amount of cool stuff WE can do at the browser end.
www.eFax.com are spammers
the outcome will suffer because the underlying architecture is off limits
So what? This shouldn't be a problem. In fact it should be a good thing. Is he still in the last century? Hasn't he heard of webstandards? A good website will have have content separated from presentation. I don't know if slashdot has that kind of separation, but it should. Anyway take a look at CSS Zen Garden for examples.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Now I know who to blame for not being able to find all my regular stuff on theonion anymore.
Having recently overhauled the site's markup to conform to HTML Strict 4.01, Slashdot has now achieved a more or less clean separation of form and content. And thanks to the well-advertised wonders of CSS, it's now possible for any enterprising designer to develop a new, production-ready (or nearly ready) 'skin' for the site completely on her own.
I will not tolerate another web design article--especially not one that's going to lecture me about underlying architecture--when it starts with a paragraph like that.
``Separation of concerns'' through XML documents and CSS markup as these web intelligista overlords keep reminding us is meaningless on a project of the scale of Slashdot. I thought Taco was just taking a stand against these ivory tower assholes, but it turns out he was just lazy and eventually found someone to kowtow to their dogma. Perhaps in some fantasy world people write XML documents and post them and select style and bam you have instant ENTERPRISE WEB CONTENT, but in the real world (read: nearly every major web operation) there's a huge underlying program (such as Slash) that generates this content.
I've never so much as looked as the tarball for Slash, but I'm going to guess that changing the background color of every page will not involve updating every single article ever, which is what every XML/CSS advocate is promising liberation from. It's probably about as simple as updating a handful of lines of code in the article rendering routines. If Slash doesn't, well, it would be different from every other proprietary web engine ever written.
Large operations approximate the functionality of XML/CSS-orgasms internally. The only people who might care about this crap are small operations where programmer time doesn't exist: why they don't just use content management software instead is beyond me. WordPress? CityDesk? I've never used it before but I imagine you'll go further with it than listening to the screechings of some XML/CSS acolyte.
Web designer Khoi Vinh, whose firm Behavior is responsible for the redesign of the Onion,
And what a horrible job you did:
1. Smearing ads all over the place. I remember seeing not one, but TWO banner ads toting NBC's "The Office" on the same page. you know, in case we didn't see the first one. It's IGN or *insert video game news site here* bad.
2. The oh-so-classic time-honored tradition of putting ALL the links humanly possible on the main page. If i have to hit Ctrl+F to find something obvious, there's something wrong.
3. Very little new content. A lot of the bottom of the main page is just links to older content, none of which is available to free users.
4. Inconsistent overall look compared to the older site.
Can websites jump the shark?
(You could also install a proxy extension to flip the proxy on and off just for slashdot if you like.)
I used to read /. on my Danger Sidekick II mobile phone. Since the last /. redesign, the text renders as a single one-word vertical column.
Be heard || Be herd
I had the same problem when I was on DirecWay, with more or less the identical response. Fortunately, I was able to get terrestrial wireless a couple of months later, but the point is that the editors frankly don't give a damn about their customers. It would be trivially easy to implement something that would eliminate these restrictions for logged in users with high karma (or users who are more than "X" years old, or implement one of these wacky text code things for users on problem subnets, or whatever) but they just can't be bothered.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Hi,
:-)
Go and include a CSS id or class with every single component in the slashdot template
like it's done with http://www.csszengarden.com/ and let the users decide
csszengarden is pure css fun!
I _really_ like it.
We need to be able to do photoshop contests and NSFW posts. Also why limit it to just geeks stuff. I want to flame people about stuff like they do on FARK. We could be like FARK only smarter.
and, of course, it was rejected. I archived to my Journal, but here it is...
I have found my self wondering of late whether or not the Moderation system of Slashdot (meaning, this site in particular, as opposed to the underlying implementation in Slashcode) would be more effective if a few changes were made.
For instance, it seems to me from my own experience, that readers are more likely to post in stories that cover a field in which the reader may have a particular expertise, yet the moderation system disallows those same posters from moderating any posts under the same topic. Would it not be more effective to allow moderation to all posts but one's own? Why isn't the moderation system open to all logged in users at all times? Why are we limited to five moderation points at a time? Why is the moderation scale limited to -1 through +5? Why are we limited to single point changes?
Personally, I have my preferences set to display +4 and above, and most of my own moderation tends to be downward, as I personally feel it is of more value to the community for me to down-mod those posts which I feel do not deserve a 4 or 5 rating. I take my moderation very seriously, and I do not mod on a whim. In fact, many times when I am awarded moderation points, I end up allowing them to expire because I do not feel any affinity for the topics currently being discussed, I do not possess enough expertise in the topics being discussed, or I want to particpate in a debate. Again, those discussions I join tend to be those in which I have particular interest or expertise, and I suspect that many posters here would tell similar tales.
I submit that changing the moderation system to -2 to +10 would result in a more accurate characterization of the relative quality level of the posts I see. I also think that we need a "-2, Incorrect" moderation type for posts that contain information that is just downright wrong, and perhaps a "+2, Definitive" moderation type for stellar examples. Perhaps other new moderation types would also help. Could we not open the moderation to all users at all times and do away with the five points at a time limitation by simply not allowing a particular user to moderate a particular post more than once?
I've read the FAQ section on moderation many times, and it still leaves me a bit disappointed. As a 5-digit UID Slashdotter (just a little way over 15 bits at #33785), I've seen Slashdot go through many different phases, and I'm wondering:
Where does the Slashdot community stand on these issues in 2005?
only gives formatting info, XML tag describes content - a subtle difference. With XSLT applied to XML I can produce XHTML!!! As for XML useless, not if people know what the tags mean - thats what schemas and comments are for. RSS is an easily understood XML format, last time I looked it was quite a success....
I want to be paid for criticizing the way people put colored blocks around their text...
You (the subscribers) knew, or should have known, what Slashdot was when you subscribed, and have no grounds for complaint.
But this is a problem for potential subscribers, too. I am one of those types that when I use shareware for maybe a year or more, I pony up. If it's donationware, I try to send along a little something. For over 2 years, I have been contemplating subscribing, but it seems my moderation bit has been permanently turned off. It doesn't seem right or fair to me that I would pay to have a crippled account.
This is not just my whining about the crippled state of my account. It is also an observation that the /. editors occasionally exercise editorial bias both on the level of code and (less frequently) on the level of content. When this editorialization takes place behind-the-scenes with no accountability or acknowledgement, it reminds me that /. is, ultimately, a profitable private sandbox whose owners/editors are unaccountable to their public.
As long as this is the case, I'll use /. as a free resource. Once there is greater accountability, I will subscribe. For me it's not even a question of professionalism in terms of content. I don't mind duplicate posts, Roland Piquepaille, or AC trolls. However, secret editorialization and crippled user accounts are things that keep me from paying with my hard-earned cash.
Then again, talk is cheap.
blog
Oh, you meant navel gazing...
IMHO, I despise the new Onion layout. It's scattered and unorganized. It's very hard to "flow" through the page and read everything. It just looks like all the content was vomited out.
I find myself just skimming the headlines and jumping to AV Club lately (which also suffers with the new layout, but not quite as much).
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
The new site is a disaster, and it's all about generating revenue through obtrusive ads.
So a couple years ago I was working in London and I was given a laptop to use by my employer. I decided to download the onion to read offline while riding the train home from work one day. Turns out the page wouldn't render because of a reference to a 3rd-party adserver graphic I hadn't downloaded. To fix it, I opened up my editor and was removing these ad tags from the code. Next thing I know, a man grabbed my laptop off my lab and bolted out of the train.
Apparently, the Onion REALLY wants you to see those ads and has implemented some pretty excessive means of enforcement.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Am I the only one who *hates* the new onion? It turned a more-or-less-resembling-newsprint site into an unreadable mess of columns without any clear design to it. It looks like they just took all the content and shoved it together without any differentiation between the different things. It was much more readable when you could easily scan only to the parts you normally read. Further, I think the 'push content below the fold' tactic that they seem to have employed is just an unsightly attempt to increase ad revenue down there. They've lost a reader in me, anyway. The Onion is now a chore to read. Good job.
Navel, dude. It matters. It's even symptomatic.
Never heard of him, would never hire him. This guy's supposed to be a web design guru? Ever heard of accessibility? Rule 1#: Make sure your site works properly in the most popular browser.
No, by far it is not. I share a network connection with an off campus communications provider where there are plenty of people who visit and post here. There are a few trolls and since we all share the same outgoing IP address, I get blocked as well.
I have a subscription, I get downmodded for my "unpopular" views unfairly at times, but the majority of them are just fine. My karma is still Excellent! so wtf?
They better start changing some of the ways things work around here... I had to use an "other" isp, my neighbor that wasn't on the lame network, to post here even!
I can still get each issue in print for free. One of the perks of living in a hippy town :-)
Normally I don't post stuff "About" Slashdot here since I find meta naval gazing very boring...
Good to know that what is of interest to the readers is important, instead of just what interests the editors...
My biggest complaint with slashdot is that you can't hide a rathole.
Say there's a topic on space travel and someone chimes in about their breastfeeding theory and soon there's 85 replies: each one regaling us with a delightful and witty breastfeeding story that I'd just rather skip over. A collapsible outline format would allow the discerning reader to simply close irrelevant threads and subordinate branches.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Considering that the Onion now looks like scrambled eggs, I don't think I'll RTFA. Where does the eye go when viewing the site? Decisions, decisions. Oh, and the AdBlock tabs all over the Onion's page, on what are not ads but content, don't help the mess, either.
If I was responsible for the Onion's re-design I'd be heading my head in shame. It's clearly the worst re-design I've ever seen, enough to finally convince me to stop reading the Onion and their one repeated joke.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
a long time since I rapped with ya but all is not well in the house of Anchower. See, I have this website that I monkey around with and then I started getting emails from these hombres I don't even know, saying stuff about my site givin 404's and other stuff I have no idea about. Now I already have the brakes squealing on my Festiva and I don't need something else to worry about so I give this dude $15 to fix my site. Now I can't find anything. It's worse than when I hid my stash in my apartment and couldn't remember where I put it. So now I gotta pay the dude another $15 to make it like it was before. Gotta go, neighbor kids are keying the Festiva!
no sleepy!
Escape your opening angle brackets with < because I don't know what you are saying there.
Not true. An XML tag describes a boundary of an element.
I think what you mean to say was that an XML element describes content, but that's not true either. Semantics only come into effect once both parties have agreed on a particular document type. With ad-hoc document types there are no shared semantics, no describing of content.
Yes, but you are relying on the XSLT to be applied, because without it your XML format is meaningless. That is something you cannot rely upon, not today, not for years.
"Tags" mean "an element starts here". You mean "element types". And it doesn't matter if people know what the element types mean, it's software that has to interpret the information, and software doesn't know what element types mean when given an ad-hoc XML format.
Which web browsers understand schemas and comments?
RSS is an established format with an open specification. Ad-hoc XML formats meet neither of these criteria.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The Onion doesn't resize properly with display sizes, and isn't low res friendly at all!
Not to mention, there was clearly no FF compatibility testing done.
Isn't one of the great achievements of CSS that if you do it properly, you can take a two or three column setup and make it instantly resize for any screen resolution?
Heck, I generally use a leftbar and/or a right bar that have an absolute size and a center that doesn't. Unless it's being resized for a pocket display, it never fails to fill the whole screen.
And really, you just plan a separate CSS or even a separate site for the smaller screens if you really feel it is necessary.
Behavior's website couldn't look worse if it were done by a three yearold banging the monitor with crayons.
What if you really don't like the new layout of The Onion? Is that where Slashdot is headed?
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Well the code is open so anyone can change it whenever they want. I sincerely hope that if somebody decided to do a major architectural overhaul while still preserving the functionality of the site, then the devs would be welcoming of that. (I know if someone offered to do all my work and make it easier me for me to do other things going forward, while giving my clients and users enhanced performance and functionality, I would say "YES.")
/. then they should. If you email the devs with an overview of your intentions beforehand, you will have a higher likelihood of getting your changed merged, I would guess. Well, if they don't do that then shame on them, but that's what I would do.
The contest is a good way to get some publicity for the aesthetic improvements, but if anyone wants to hack on
Without addressing any architectural shortcomings that may limit the presentation, this isn't design any more, it's merely 'visuals'. The word 'design' is about problem solving, and implies engineers and visual designers work together as a team to create the best solution.
If you make any architecture changes verboten you'll get exactly what you want. It may not, however, be anything close to what you need.
... that they would stop underlining the links. /duck
Read Digg instead
A quick look at the underlying HTML structure and what I'd do differently.
... X of Y comments" portion. I'm not sure lists are the correct way to proceed here.
Key thing to remember to think about informational structure, not visual structure (that's the job of CSS) when authoring HTML documents. It's a bit obvious visual structure was definately on the mind as the new HTML for the site was constructed.
In a well structured HTML document, you're not going to see many BR tags. It's not something you do on purpose, it's just a product of good HTML. BR tags are more for visual separation and not content separation. There are a lot of BR tags, many of which really aren't needed.
You've got heading tags inside list elements. This isn't wrong, but it's a sign that something usually isn't right. In this case, the H2 used for the "main" link under "sections" in the left column. Heading tags should at least follow some kind of hierarchical structure. If anything, an h3, not an h2 tag should be used. But really, no heading tag at all, just a STRONG tag with a class applied to the containing LI element to set the background color is how it should be.
DIV elements containing a single block element. Best examples of this are heading elements wrapped by a DIV element. There's no need for this from a data structure perspective. The class(es) and/or ids applied to the containing DIV should be directly applied to the heading tag. By wrapping a heading with a DIV element you're only bloating the page with needless markup. If this is being done for visual structure purposes, you need to rethink your approach (workarounds will be available, just spend a moment to figure it out.)
Text in paragraph form not being contained in a P tag. The P tag provides more than just visual structure, and should be used heavily over multiple BR tags. In this case, the text in the "indexhead" class DIV element at the top of the page ("meta moderated... the next story...") is wrapped by a DIV and not a P tag. Use a P tag, it's a block element and can take the class assignment placed on the DIV. It'll also add some whitespace (which you can control) to get that text off the green bar below it.
The "storylinks" DIV class should be inside the "articles" DIV class elements. This way the "storylinks" content is directly associated with its story in the markup, rather than having to make assumptions that the "storylinks" DIV elements immediately follow the "article" DIV element that they relate to.
Interesting use of lists for the "read more
I would use dictionary lists for the entire page of articles. The DT element would be the article title, the DD would contain the summary and extra information. This provides nice structure to the information and makes it much easier to group information together. Whether or not this is proper use of dictionary lists is debatable (but I'm for expanding the use of DL/DT/DD elements outside of boring, literal dictionary entries; taking a more liberal view on their use).
And one quick tip for helping with formatting of HTML source. When you need two elements next to each other (no whitespace between) here's a 'cute' way to do it,
<li>
content goes here
</ul
><ul>
content goes here
</ul
And so on... this is valid HTML and allows you to throw in linebreaks and tabs to keep the source clean and easy to use. I like to use this a lot because some browsers (Opera,IE) get very crazy about whitespace where none is assumed to exist.
Those are my immediate bits of advice.
You can read some of my wild rantings on this sort of thing here (ready blog entries from bottom up if you want them to make sense). And here is my attempt and showing what can be done while trying to use as little extra markup as possible and still doing an "interesting" layout.
They could make this site more Greasemonkey friendly. Since not everyone uses Javascript. They could leave some of the work for those who do.
--
www.backbase.com
Please focus your attention on that eyesore, because I can't take being fooled into seeing that trainwreck again.
Make all the new themes and designs you want, fine with me, but you need to keep this theme for people who want it. Slashdot just wouldn't be the same if it didn't look like it does now. At least in my mind it wouldn't.
I'm the editor at Publish.com. I hope this gets moderated up, because some things need to be rectified.
First up, the article was my idea, and I asked Khoi to write it. I spoke to him when we did an article on the Onion's redesign, and he agreed to do a piece on the upcoming slashdot redesign, which was then a current post on these boards. Please don't think that Khoi doesn't have better things to do than think about ways to change Slashdot. He's a busy guy with a great business. He's also a great designer. Just check out his design at subtraction.com, and the portfolio at behavior. Khoi has been instrumental in educating the CSS and design community about grid design recently, among other things.
Second, Khoi is a very considerate and thoughtful person. He didn't write the headline and deck, my copy desk did. Khoi then emailed me and asked me if we could change it, because it was more inflammatory than he meant. We complied with his (very reasonable) request.
Third, I agree with Khoi's editorial. I think there are many many things that could be done to improve slashdot. (And while we're busy critiquing site designs, would somebody please redesign publish.com for me? It's hideous.) There's certainly nothing wrong with looking into the possibilities. If I could add anything to that discussion, I would say that, in order to keep the focus on the community here, any redesign or redesign contest should be open first only to slashdot members, and then to the greater Web community.
Finally, I really dig the onion's redesign. I think it leverages the onion's emphasis on parody by mimicking the layout of a small-town newspaper Web site. You can check out our article on the redesign here: http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1759,1859658,00. asp
So there's that. Thanks for reading.
Thanks,
Steve Bryant
Editor, Publish.com
The Iron Law of the net states that if you post a spelling flame you'll inevitably make a spelling error in it somewhere. It's been that way for decades.
It's still a good point. A spelling error can jolt some people just as badly as a ringing telephone interrupting a coding session.
If you want to see an example of bad site design, of what Slashdot should avoid looking like at all costs, just look at publish.com, the site on which the article was posted.
Click on the link to TFA, and see what a bad web site looks like:
formatted
in such
narrow
columns
that only
one or
two words
per line
can fit
in the
space
available.
(This is not the same thing as links to other pages appearing within the article text, which is perfectly acceptable.)
There are actually no pictures on the page at all that have anything to do with the article itself.
Contrast this with Slashdot's current layout:
- There is a narrow bar at the top with links to other sites.
- There is a narrow column down the left side with a bunch of links to other areas of the site.
- There are a few (very few!) graphics near the top that link to related topics or sections, and the graphics are halfway decent looking and are actually somewhat indicative of the corresponding link (as opposed to the links on publish.com, many of which are photos of people that I don't know, and in whom I am not the least bit interested).
- There are several links to external pages, and some of them are to commercial sites, but they are all at least somewhat related to the main article.
- There is at most one, only mildy obtrusive, ad between the article and the comments.
- The comments section, which is the main section, takes up over 90% of the horizontal space, and is uniterrupted by ads, extraneous links, and other distracting garbage.
There is no doubt which site is better.IIRC, you can turn this bar off in your user preferences.
I highly recommend that C.T. not listen to the "pros" and "experts", who seem to be responsible for a large portion of the crap commercial web pages infesting the World Wide Web.
A few other recommendations, not covered in the above:
- Please let your users pick the color schemes, or at least give them a choice of schemes, so that they can avoid the games.* and it.* color schemes and the like.
- Please avoid using any Flash or ECMAScript/JavaScript/AnyScript, or at least provide a non-script fallback for those of us who have all of that crap disabled.
- Allow us to use more character entity references (such as °, ½, etc.) in comments.
- Don't count markup in sig lines as contributing to the 120-character limit.
There are probably some other things, but I can't think of them right now.Also, increase the limit to 160 or higher, but don't allow any more than two or three newlines in a sig.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Great.
Thanks again for reminding us how important slashdot is to you guys now. I mean it wasn't completely apparent by your constant dupe posting, lack of editing and inability to keep the site up to date with more modern message board systems. But thanks to your so blatent declaration, and made with pride even , that you hadn't spent 5 minutes on a contest for the plebia... er readers you have made your feelings completely known.
If you guys really care so little why don't you find some people who do?
--- I do not moderate.
I think using XML + XSLT is quite an elegant way of seperating content from presentation, but I wouldn't expect my users browser to be able to do XSLT transforms (mobile devices, old browsers etc), so why not just do the transform server side to product XHTML for them?
What they really MEANT was...
"We don't want to pay for web design so we'll just come up with a crappy contest that takes five minutes to figure out and get it all done for free.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I think one of the WORST additions to modern television is exactly what you've described. We've given up a good percentage of TV screen space to static station logos, little "mini-ads" that slide on and off the bottom of the screen (as if the commercials aren't enough), and now on some channels, we get to watch a static "i/e" logo just to make sure we know, all throughout the show that something is supposed to be educational.
Funny part is, I can do just fine without all this crap. Yes, CRAP.
To the networks: GIVE US BACK OUR SCREEN SPACE, YOU MORONS!
Whatever redesigning takes place, it should start there.
For a while now I've only ever read The Onion online by using their low-bandwidth, text-only portal for mobile devices:
http://mobile.theonion.com/content/
This gets you no splash/flash advertisement, and direct links to the "content". It's much less annoying.
The front page of the onion looks like a bomb went off in the middle of some content. You have stories all over the place.
The Onion is laid out like it is because it's a news parody site. As such, it would make sense to mimic other news sites (CNN, ABCNews, CBS, etc) with a featured story on the left, shorter summaries on the right, nav bar to the far left, and so on.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Why couldn't somebody get Fat Harry in Texas to redesign his site so it's as clean as /. I don't mind the ads, it's the layout that bothers me as much as The Onion bothers some of you.
Kevin
Irrational Diversions
"Next thing I know, a man grabbed my laptop off my lab and bolted out of the train."
Now that's just mean. Stealing a blind person's laptop.
Doors swinging and hoofs in the distance.
I used to enjoy Slashdot.. but its not the medium but the message which needs an overhaul. No amount of Spit and Polish to the interface will make me want it more. Id like to see quality of content and value in editorial response. This place begins to feel like one of those shops on the high street just months away from its Closing Down sale.
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
I'm not suggesting that the current moderation threshold be removed - far from it.
However, sometimes you get a story at +3, and find there is a larger number of comments than you'd like to wade through, so you want to raise your threshold - that's where I'd envision the use of the CSS to further increase the filtering.
www.eFax.com are spammers
That website has so many movie reviews PLANTED byt movie execs etc. This way people reading the review could meta-moderate denouncing a review as SPAM or PLANT.
The only thing I dont like about slashdot is the way the threads are layed out. It should be just like any other bulletin board. Use the STANDARD format.
While I agree with you that TV seems to have taken an ugly turn for the hyperactive, it's precisely because the web has "hyper" built right into it, while TV is a much more linear medium. They get one screen's worth of stuff to show you; if you don't like what the announcer is saying you'll switch to something else. So they put up a lot of extra info in hopes of keeping your attention.
TV news is also primarily an auditory medium, and you only get one auditory channel. So they fill in the rest with text, but since the screen is low-res it has to be moving or constantly changing to get any real bandwidth at all. That information is supposed to be useful; if you don't like it you're watching the wrong news channel.
The web is a much more interactive medium, so they can put more information a click away.
The web is a much more civilized way to present news. But TV has one advantage: you don't have to look at TV. You can listen to it while you're cooking breakfast or getting dressed, and look at it only for the visuals, though that makes the multiple screen chunks unnecessary and perhaps even harmful (since the visuals are even smaller on an already low-res medium).
Personally, I've given up on TV entirely. I get my news with a combination of the web, the radio (occasionally) and the daily newspaper. (I have an advantage that my daily newspaper is The Washington Post, which is a major international newspaper, and so the high school football team never makes the front page.)
But I don't blame the TV people for trying to cram as much information onto the screens as they can. I think that busy-ness comes from the web rather than the other way around.
For dealing with a lot of comments, Google Groups has the most useful web interface I've ever seen: The "tree" view, which shows you exactly where you are in the hierarchy in a pane off to the left. I've always wondered why this paradigm never caught on -- it's so useful and intuitive. I'd love to see Slashdot adopt it.
See here, for example.
It seems to me that you could set the pane to only display the info you wanted: Comments rated 4 and above, and those from "friends," for example.
I don't know spit about web programming, but it would be cool if the new design let programmers write creative and useful interfaces like this.
- AJ
I would like to see XHTML conformance.
Less JavaScript.
Perhaps a better font?
Plenty of themes to choose between.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABTS
NABTS was a way of addressing information delivery via the TV signal. It came in various forms, from Teletext in Europe to Intercast in the US. With a lot of PC's being equiped with TV-tuners. This was a viable means of delivery.
>since I find meta naval gazing very boring
You mean like checking out your own yacht instead of admiring your neighbor's?
Make slashdot run linux
You can't even get the Slashdot Inner Circle to acknowledge this simple problem.
Kind of makes browsing a sisyphean task.
(Bug happens in IE as well as Firefox)
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Dude, you'll remain a nub until you start spelling it "n00b".
Something which I apparently need to find, because this style of ads is around more and more.
/. I sometimes read the ads (google ad or top banner). On a site with a design like the onion, it is just to confusing to get even interested in what they have to tell. I do not think that constitutes good design. If you mix that with what you mention, a new style in doing what they were good at, they are really on the dangerous edge of loosing their public.
About the layout: On
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
When? Oh wait, Khoi must be responsible for its "Skip this ad" home page and pop up.
Right. And that's the way we likes it.
Didn't Plastic re-design Slashdot almost 4 years ago. They used all the same baseline code. Improved new design and nav. And offered classic design and nav.
That site is still up...
-------
--Hit it where they aint.
Use firefox. Install the Web-Developer plugin. Cntrl+Shift+S. Style free browsing. The Onion suddenly appears as one big friendly column, reminiscent of the olden days of yore.
Slashdot is also very readable without styles.
oh. my. fucking. god.
I saw the new onion the other day, and I just checked the new salon.com.
jesus fucking christ, somebody beat this guy up and take away his keyboard. Mr. Vinh - I address you directly - please stop fucking up websites that had perfectly good design. Your obsession with blinding amounts of whitespace and no borders to differentiate between information sources FUCKING HURTS.
Dick.
As a person with vision problems, I [mostly] like slashdot's layout, because when I zoom the text to a size I can read, I don't end up with a bunch of one, two and three word sentences stacked (and overlapping sometimes) within a tiny column. The Onion (and far too many other sites) have forgotten that the USER/VIEWER was originally intended to be in charge of the formatting and layout of their content. That was the wonderful promise of something like XML. By separating the content markup from the layout commands, it is [relatively] easy for the user to choose how to view content. Not so on all crappy sites that have fixed pixel width columns and large amounts of "text as graphics" that even a browser with as good a zoom feature as Opera cannot make "unfuzzy" when zoomed large.
I'm praying that the /. redesign will not forget its visually impaired readers like so many other sites (such as The Onion) have done. Fixed size columns, tables and things like that just aren't good when viewed with text sizes of three or four hundred percent!
Slashdot has been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
CRAZY MEXICAN-STYLE SLASHDOT!
The thing that needs changing most is the mod system. Insightful and funny, e.g., are orthogonal. So are informative and flamebait. And various others may not be independent, but aren't closely aligned.
Modification should allow (where + means positive, 0 means no opinion, and - means negative:
insightful + 0 - (as in insightful or not sure or uninsightful)
informative + 0 -
funny + 0 -
troll + 0 -
flamebait + 0 -
good read + 0 -
And it should be possible to cast one vote in each category, with the default being no opinion.
Score would then be a tuple, and filters coul be emplaced on which tuple values you want to read. There should be no limit on the scores (but manual resets are necessary to allow for in case poll stuffing is detected). Karma should continue to be single number (possibly hidden), but should have no real limit (or possibly be limited to a single signed byte value, if you can afford the space for a double). My first thought is that the karma value of a post should be 1, 0, or -1 depending on the sign of the sum of the mod values, but if you can use floats, perhaps the mean (with troll and flamebait having their signs reversed, or course).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually, I think it is: comparing the typical Mac fonts (Geneva and the like) with the typical Windows fonts (Arial and the like) at the same point size, they certainly look significantly different to me, with the Windows fonts rendering significantly smaller on average. I've always assumed this was something to do with Macs historically using different physical screen resolutions, though I don't have any numbers to check whether that makes sense.
This is a very good argument for what we all seem to agree on around here: the main body text of a page should be set to the default font size configured by the user's browser, not x-small, 90%, or (God forbid) an absolute pixel value like 10px. This is usability 101 stuff, and any professional web designer who's still getting it wrong doesn't deserve the title. Setting text in a small font that many users can't read isn't stylish or clever, it's thoughtless and inconsiderate.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
By "modern television", I'm assuming you mean 'American' programming, which in no way, represents or reflects the other, far more intelligent and impartial news outlets which exist. Fox, CNN != Gaia.
Fonts are supposed to be fucking scaleable, so don't use absolute font sizes!
(No, I don't want to use a browser which ignores standards and allow you to scale them)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The new Onion format SUCKS.
oops, slashdot mangles the URL. just follow the original one above and look at December 6th, 1998 :)
Do like most wankers that don't know how to use tabs or simply read the article and then use the back button - skip reading the article and just start making dumb comments. Obviously you have the later part of that plan down so you're halfway there already.
If the back button is to confussing for you then did you ever manage to use a VCR? Every time you wanted to watch a movie again you had to wait for the tape to reach the end and auto-rewind or did you finally learn to use that complex thing called the rewind button?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Designers are wankers.
The more recent changes to using CSS(?) have increased the delays here quite dramatically (and depressingly too if that's a word?).
Charles Angelich
I had a look at the Onion.com site it is obviously designed by a print designer!!!! the layout is too printish too cluttered the designer has absolutely no idea about the different layout requirements of web pages.
He's the guy who did the Onion redesign? I'm not so sure Slashdot would fair well with a 63-column layout.
Some have mentioned it but here is a screenshot of their NORMAL broadcast:6 .JPG
0 .html
http://www.w3.org/Talks/1999/0512-tvweb-www8/IMG0
Oddly enough there was an interesting article about CNN's "Situation Room" with video walls and such. They talk about how the producer wanted to be like a war room in the White House or Pentagon or some such nonsense. Essentially this article discusses exactly your point.
Here is the link:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68859,0
Libertas in infinitum
Just FYI, the correct lyrics are "there's no place I'd rather be.."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's been a while, but I miss meta naval gazing too much. Keep up the good work guys! By the way, the awards section is looking kinda dated don't you think?
Anyway, my main reason for posting this bizarre, out of date message is that I needed to add my voice the the many that have been saying that slashdot has gone all gooey in links/lynx et al. I want to say: I LOVE IT! I always hated the cramped way that tables load in text browsers, and it's become a minimalist joy to use slashdot in text mode now that everything is laid out in order so that PgUp and PgDn are useful, as god intended.
Here's one for the hardcore researchers amongst you, checking up on old style related posts for ideas for webdesign. In links, comments aren't very clearly defined. It's something you get used to, like most console based quirks (whereas in gui mode you can usually hack quirks to death), but it's certainly worth looking at if you are obsessed with multi browser happiness, like I am. Having said that, the fact that slashdot has stuck with the time honoured functions of html, like lists, rather than reinventing the wheel by trying to use css for crap like that, means that text-browser compatibility remains amongst the highest around.
Sorry for the subject. Please don't ban my subnet!