Image: Lst1984
With our redesign complete (aside from a few small tweaks), it’s time for reflection and a time to highlight a few features and tweaks that we made along the way.
For those who refuse to love our new design, I suggest you check out the Recent Entries option on the menu above. It’s a more traditional blog layout. We’ve updated that view and all of the other views with more summary information about each post, such as the author name and comment counts.
The Disqus comment system appears to be working out well. There are lots of features available to Disqus users that are documented in their knowledge base. As there are years of comments that have been imported from our old site, regular commenters may be able to merge their profiles and claim old comments. There’s even some tricks like being able the enter the @username of another commenter. While some do not like the fact that commenters must be registered, I think I’ve made it as easy as possible to leverage other identity systems as opposed to having to create a whole new persona. Requiring registered commenters makes for a better community and will allow us to police it more effectively.
Post have feeds, authors have archives and feeds, posts have comments feeds, there’s a site-wide comment feed, we’ve started tweeting more stories beside just post notification updates, and we’ve migrated our popular live blogroll. All in all things just work better than they did with our old Movable Type software. We’ll be adding other small features in the coming weeks and months thanks to the active WordPress developer community.
Our mobile site is using a basic WPTouch design. Making that a little nicer looking and adding our branding is on the to do list. Additionally we’re expecting to release iPad/iPhone and Android apps later this year.
Personally I appreciate all of the feedback, both positive and negative, although I much prefer the positive kind. I’ve listed to those who long for the old format and have tried to add as many features back as possible. Each post has a links between the content and comments section that are links to the next and previous posts. There’s the previously mentioned “Recent Entries” page (feel free to bookmark that) and at some point I may offer the ability to toggle between that view and the main page view via a cookie.
I’ve made the accommodations I could make, but the design we have no is the design we’re going to have. That’s something readers and site authors are just going to have to accept. I hope you (and they) stick around and keep reading and participating.
