Welcome to Ordinary Times
You’ll notice things have changed around the site today.
For one thing, we’ve overhauled the look and functionality of the blog. We’ve also taken the active sub-blogs and grafted them into the home page in a way that is hopefully easier to navigate and manage for both admins and readers.
We’ve also changed the name of the site to Ordinary Times.
This is after months (years?) of discussion about our previous name, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, which—while clever—was viewed by many as quite possibly sexist and at the very least a moniker which might turn away female readers and potential contributors.
Ordinary Times also sounds a little bit more like a news site or professional blog, which is something many people writing here wanted for reasons both personal and professional.
The spirit of the site—civil discussion and debate, a wide-range of views and opinions, etc—will remain the same, and hopefully grow. We hope to be more inclusive, more diverse, and more space awesome than ever before.
And because no site overhaul and redesign is complete without one, this is also time for our annual fund-raiser. If you like where we’ve gone over the years and if you want even more good content and a faster, better website in the future, I hope you’ll consider donating a few of your hard earned dollars to the cause.
Test.Report
I think they’re working, dude.
Thanks for all your work.Report
test?Report
Testing out Disqus comments.Report
More testingReport
Yep.Report
I like discuss… and I like that the nesting now shows to whom one is testing.Report
oops, not any more.Report
Looks great! One change I’d like to see, however, is to add an author line just below the post title. As is, when I scroll to the top of the page, I have no indication that this post is by Erik Kain–it would be nice to know who I’m reading without having to scroll down.Report
Yeah, I need to figure out how to get the byline up top for sure. Thanks.Report
I’m sure I like only being able to access the most recent posts via the animated headline image thing.Report
If you meant to include a “not” in there, I’m right there with ya Fnord. I think the current – and by that I mean, I guess, the active – FP posts need to be listed on the main page. Somewhere. Easily accessible. Visually.
I also think collapsing the distinction between the main page posts and the sub-blogs in the Gifts of Gab section is problematic. On the one hand, it diminishes the ostensible importance of main-page posts. On the other, it elevates sub-blog posts to a level that may not warranted or even desirable given that those posts are often written to a relatively closed audience.
I could go on.
OK. I will. I think gravatars ought to be on the right so’s not to interfere with the actual text. I think the reply button ought to be much more subtle. And I think the threading is confusing, what with all the visual breaks in color and boxing. It makes the responses seem disconnected to the comment their responding too. That they’re an independent, free standing thought rather than linked to something else that was said.
Apart from that, I love the redesign.Report
And I think the threading is confusing, what with all the visual breaks in color and boxing.
Yeah, this is pretty terrible. Personally, I recommend something along the lines of Slashdot or The Oil Drum, with clear vertical markings indicating the depth, and where any particular subthread ends. In a shade of gray/black that is clearly visible.Report
Seconded on the Oil Drum method, which I recommended about 2 years ago. Shouldn’t be that hard to figure out since Dr. Saunders’ father is one of the founders of the Oil Drum website.Report
The animated headline has “featured posts” which is not necessarily the most recent posts. It’s the posts that the editors choose to highlight.
The most recent mainfeed posts are listed below, for “The League” though it may have been “Ordinary Blog” when you wrote that comment. Recent posts for the mainfeed and subblogs are presently listed to the right (they may not have been when you initially made your comment).Report
This is something the editors probably need to keep in mind. As cool as the FP animated slider for Featured Posts is – because it is so prominent & eye-catching – but if they don’t rotate those posts frequently, it may look to visitors as if there is no new site content, when there actually is.Report
Posting partially as a test, and partially to say how awesome everything looks.Report
Check, check.Report
How do I cancel a comment?Report
Sexy new look… very cool.Report
Hm; I can comment, but even when I’m logged into the site it’s still asking me for an identity. Ah, I had to make one on Disquis.
You’re getting closer, Erik.Report
Testing, testing.Report
It’s cold and there are wolves after me!Report
I don’t like change so I’m biased against it… but it objectivly looks good.Report
Also I’ve lost my icon.. maybe Kazzy’s wolves stole em.. ugh.Report
Somewhere around where you comment should be a gear symbol that brings up Disqus settings, with options along a sidebar. Under “avatar” it allows you to upload one from your computer, from the web, use your Gravatar icon, plus a couple others.
I tried the “use gravatar” option but that didn’t work for me, so I just saved my old image and re-uploaded it directly to disqus.
Report
Yes it seems to have sorted itself out. The ol’ globe is back.Report
My ISP (Insight) just got bought out by Time Warner Cable, and a news site had a little header from TWC telling me I was seeing the “lite” version of the content and that I should set up an account with Time Warner for full bandwidth access.
Then I clicked over to the league, the fonts and format were all wrong, and I couldn’t successfully comment. So I assumed TWC had completely screwed up what had been very reliable and trouble free Internet service. I vowed to hunt their executives down and eat their beating hearts in front of their screaming children.
Now I found out you’re to blame!
Well, actually I assumed that someone new had been trying to learn the ins and outs of WordPress and did one of those very bad things that bloggers occasionally do, eating their current format and bouncing them back to some archived version they had when they first started out. So I assumed “Ordinary Times” was something from the early 2000’s that became The League, and you folks were desperately trying to undo the damage.
Report
i like the new look but i don’t like DisqusReport
Really?Report
and will my old RSS feeds still workReport
No. Not for the sub blogs.Report
Crimony, now i need to redo my avatarReport
You can have Disqus use your old gravatar.Report
Thanks Erik! You guys are doing good work to make this easy.Report
Does this thing work?Report
and now…Report
I like that we have a search function now though. Thanks.Report
Excited to see the months of discussion come to life. Looks great so far Erik.Report
Thanks!Report
Looks great although I need to figure out how to get my name back. Not sure how I feel about the new comment structure.Report
Me too.Report
You can change your name from within your Disqus account.Report
I tried, but it seems Michelle has already been taken. Surprising, I know.Report
I believe you can change your display name, even if you are using 5Miriam9 as your sign-in name.Report
That is good to know, then I can get rid of the “the”,
but not the band…Report
Hey everyone! This is the poster known as NewDealer. I guess this will be my new name now!Report
This makes me feel old.Report
Downvoted for bein’ old.Report
Downvoted for downvoting.Report
Ow, that hurt…BUT, I upvoted myself to cancel it out!
Also, comment editing! Woo-hoo!Report
nefariously edited.Report
BTW there are a lot of times when I know comments have been made in a thread but my web browser says otherwise. Not sure if this a problem or your end or mine…..Report
Ah, I had to click on “oldest” to get comments in the right order.Report
The up/down voting will probably be the hardest thing for me to get used to. It’s one of the reasons I no longer read (very often) the Volokh conspiracy. Hopefully I’ll overcome my curmudgeonliness for the sake of this site, which I value a lot more.Report
How did up/down voting affect your decision to read or not read Volokh?Report
Hi Will,
Sorry about not answering you for a while. (And it seems that upvoting has been downvoted by the blog formatters?…..at least I don’t see the option any more on my end.)
At Volokh, the upvoting and downvoting seemed to make it harder to follow conversations in the threads, and in some, difficult to articulate way, seemed to change the comment culture for the worse. That said, I have other reasons for not reading Volokh as much (I’m less interested in the legal issues than I used to be, I’m not as sympathetic to the libertarian arguments of the better authors there (Volokh, Somin, Adler), and I’m turned off by the police-state friendly blogposts of some of the minor authors on that supposedly libertarian-leaning blog (I do, however, still try to read Orin Kerr whenever I can)).
I think, however, my misgivings about upvoting or downvoting might be on par with my misgivings earlier about nested comments with sub-threads or ONE BIG THREAD. (I actually forget if the League used to have the ONE BIG THREAD format…..if it did, I certainly got over my misgivings when it changed over.)Report
I’ve been moved. Now where is my stapler?Report
Please don’t burn the blog down, or put strychnine in the guacamole.Report
By the way, folks, please do donate. Erik pays for this whole thing out of his own pocket and this isn’t free. The money that comes in from advertisements is a pittance compared to the hosting fees. If you think you get value out of this blog — and the content isn’t going to go down in quality with the new format and the new name — then please send a little money his way. Doesn’t have to be a lot, every little bit counts. Thanks for listening to the pledge drive and we now return to your regularly-scheduled hair-splitting about what is or is not proper libertarianism.Report
Thanks, Burt. Don’t worry, I will try to be like an annoying NPR drive and keep posting beggar’s posts until we have every red cent.Report
A suggestion, please leave the donate tab on the page permanently, so we can find it when feeling generous, and not have to wait for the fund drive.Report
I’ve never donated before, but I’ll try to in the next week or so, after all the wedding hubub has died down. (I’ve already arrived in Denver, and the relatives and guests are starting to arrive, too.)
Whatever gripes I might have about the formatting (and like Greginak above, I tend to criticize new formatting and then within a few days forget what the old formatting was like), I have taken so much from this site that I don’t mind giving at least a little.Report
“…and the content isn’t going to go down in quality with the new format and the new name…”
Speak for yourself, Likko.Report
The biggest problem is that on Firefox, the top-level stuff is showing up in a very large font size with excess line spacing. Much larger type and much more space than I need for legibility, and I have to scroll down what seems like vast distances to go through things. On Safari the font sizes are more reasonable — although the red font used for individual post titles is still too big — but the line spacing is painfully wide. Any chance of allowing default the default font sizes and spacing?Report
For those who agree with me and are Firefox users, I recommend NoSquint with a zoom setting of 83% — that at least gets a reasonable amount of stuff on the screen at one time. The down side is that the text in the comment text book is smaller than is quite comfortable. Please, other than headlines, can we keep the range of text sizes used within a reasonable range? Nothing that’s too much bigger or smaller than the other stuff.Report
Out of respect for the history of cranky people complaining, I think i have always said i hate every time the site is changed. But in like three days i can’t remember what it looked like before. So on par so far. This must have been a lot of work. Thanks.Report
That’s pretty much how I’ve been (still am) in the past (the present). But yes, a lot of work must’ve gone into this site.Report
Who’d a thunk I’d be commenting on the first day of the new site??? Looks great!Report
I don’t think anybody has talked about the new name in this thread. Good move. I can’t raise any crankyness over it.Report
At some point, I’m going to post all the names that were proposed. Some were pretty amusing.Report
ohhhh please doReport
Offhand, I remember: The League of Evil Geniuses, 20,000 Leagues under the Gentlemen, Once Upon an Ordinary League in America, and Space Awesome.Report
And I think we found that Space Awesome was already taken!Report
Which is space awesome in and of itself.Report
League of Ordinary Ladies and Gentlemen, League of Ordinary Gentlepeople, League of Ordinary Gentlefolk, League of Ordinary Gentles, League of Ordinary Gentlepersons. My favorite was League of Ordinary
GentlemenGentlepeople, including the strikeout.ReportI like the idea of the striked out word. You could have tried Space League of Ordinary Space Faring People.Report
Space *FARING* people? Now I regret voting against it.Report
No one suggested just “The League of Ordinary”?Report
It was mentioned.Report
League of Ordinary Gentiles?Report
It was mentioned.Report
My favorite was one that came up in conversation, but which was: “Let Me Tell You Why You’re Wrong”Report
Here are some of the names we considered, leaving out the obvious jokes but by no means including every option we considered:
Another Sky
The Open Door
Markets and Commons
The Grand Bazaar (Which would have been great even if just for the category we could have made called “The Grand Bizarre.”)
Public Comment
Citizen Review
Citizen League
New Century Review
Public Purpose
Sages and Bards
Public House
Polis
City Center
The Mugwump
The Living Room
Citizen
Mild Manners
Under Investigation
Quote Unquote
Open for Discussion
Ordinary Conversation
Popular Demand
American Times
Extraordinary Times
A League Less Ordinary
The Accelerated Times
The Culture
An Open SocietyReport
The new name is quite good, in my opinion. Quite a few levels to it.Report
Hmm. I like it a lot more than I could’ve imagined I would. It will take me some time to settle in.Report
Looks great Erik, I really appreciate the work you’ve put into this.Report
DISQUS????? Bleeping bleeping bleep. Well, that’s going to substantially reduce my time around here.
I don’t like change, so I don’t like this. I think the lines need to be darker around the various columns and boxes – it all looks very jumbled together to me at first sight. Also: the Gab column on the right hand side has the comments mooshed together – can you put some white space between them to make them look separate? You did it with the Off the Cuff part.
And what’s that Around the Web links part just above the comment box? “Heidi Klum’s unfortunate sunburn”? Are pop-up ads on the way?
It all just looks so crowded and busy. And the font is small and hard to read. Don’t like, don’t like, don’t like. Change is bad. That’s why I’m a conservative.
On the plus side: it’s good to have a search function people can actually find.
And what’s this about a password???Report
Well the non-Disqus comments apparently broke beyond repair…Report
The links to comments in the sidebar don’t seem to be taking me directly to the comment in question, just to the post.Report
I am having the same problem. Report
Forget the small, incremental changes that don’t really get noticed over time. Just go for the big, bold, breathtaking, habit-breaking.
I’m mourning the loss of whatever Gentleman status I might have ordinarily had. And Have just one complaint: the animation on the front page; stuff like that can trigger a seizure or migraine, a conversation dhex and I once had about those dancing emoticons. (I realize, I’m unusually sensitive, but I am not unique.)
I’m humbled by the name chance; an hones, strong effort to be inclusive. Stunning.Report
Yippee! I can correct my spelling/typo problems!
Lisdexics everywhere bellacrate.Report
“I’m mourning the loss of whatever Gentleman status I might have ordinarily had.”
You’re still a Gentleman to me, zic.Report
Thanks, zic. Sorry about the slider. Maybe I can find a way to tone down the animations.Report
That’s extra ordinary. Thank you.Report
I am so excited by this change, and already like the feel of telling people I’m a “contributing blogger at Ordinary Times.”Report
I was curious about the changes. This explains much.
Looks good at first blush.
Oh, & an edit function! SoOoOoOoOo much better!Report
It’s really, really hard to use in an iPad – it keeps reloading, and things don’t quite seem to show up right (I was using Chrome).Report
BTW, as a general rule of thumb, when you have multi-blogger blogs, or blogs with substantial sections, navigation is always a primary concern. When I first visited this site a couple of years ago, it took me several months to figure out that it was a collection of blogs, and how to move between them.Report
Yay! I got to keep my name! I will have to fix my avatar later. I like the new name. I am not sure about my opinion on the new layout yet. I am sure after a week or so I will be used to it and not want anything to change, though.Report
Weird. Now it seems I can comment. But I couldn’t do it by clicking on the image in the slider and then trying to comment. That delivered me a post without any apparent comments at all.
The only way I could get here was by clicking on Reformed Republican’s comment in the Gifts of Gab sidebar. THAT delivered me to the post with Disqus comments displayed below.
Is this something that’s just glitchy because of the after-the-fact implementation of Disqus? Or is it always going to be this way? (Is it like this for anyone else?)Report
Test.Report
You should probably test out Johanna’s profile, as well.Report
He’ll do that automatically next time she uses his computer.Report
Looking good!Report
Thanks!Report
Looking things over again, it seems that the text “An Ordinary Blog” is extraneous. I know it’s supposed to be the “main” blog title, but does there even need to be one? If not, can you just drop it?
I’d also second a slightly heavier font weight for text on the main page.Report
I think there should be … something… atop that section. I’d thought we were going to go with something that incorporated The League as the remaining hat-tip to that. Something along those lines.Report
“The Times”Report
We can’t just drop it. We could do The League, but I’m not sure it conveys that this is The Blog. So I think something indicating that this is the main blog is important.Report
Is The League going to be something other than The Blog?Report
“The Bleague”Report
But you’ve got “Ordinary Times / a Blog of Politics and Culture… The Ordinary Blog.” If they are the same, why are they said twice? If they are different, why are their names so similar?Report
Well Ordinary Times is the site entire, encompassing all the sites within it. I’m not wed to An Ordinary Blog at all, but it made sense to tie the name of the Main Blog to the name of the site.Report
But is there anything on the site that isn’t a blog? That’s what I’m trying to understand. Is there a “News page” and a “Blog page”? Or just blogs?Report
My suggestion would be to reverse it and call the whole site The League and have Ordinary Times as the name for the main blog. That would suggest the group-of-entities structure (League) for the whole place, and make Ordinary Times like our USA Today (except better) for our grouping (like Stars And Stripes! for all the services or The Wall Street Journal! for all the brokerage houses or The New York Times! for all the lawfirms).Report
ALL the “Likes” to Michael’s suggestion.Report
…It would also give us our allusions to everything we liked about the old title and get rid of what we didn’t.Report
I concur wholeheartedly. Say, you’re pretty good at this 😉Report
Erik’s the one actually good at doing stuff, I’m just okay at what I intend/hope to be a positive kind of nitpicking. 😉
Cc: JHReport
I upvote!Report
Michael, The League was one of the top contenders for the site’s re-christening. However, it was widely agreed that it would be far too generic. It might resonate with old readers; for new readers, however, it would be too blank a slate, competing with too many other “The Leagues” out there.Report
I induced as much, and I understand. I wish there was a way to get around that, but I’ve played with it in my head as well, and I don’t see the way. Everything “League”-related that’s not what we had sounds weird (because it’s not a successful takeoff on an unsuccessful movie), and what we had was exclusionary.
So there it is.Report
…Though FTR I’m okay with weird, or frankly, with generic and insidery (but not overtly gender-exclusionary – I agree that needed to change), if opinion should happen to shift.Report
I agree with Michael and Glyph.Report
+1Report
This was my understanding as well. I understand Erik’s concern. Maybe “The Ordinary League”? It’s definitely important to me to have some sort of hat-tip to the “League” moniker.Report
“The Major League”.
I think of myself as a quadruple-A blogger.Report
Test comment:
SCENE ONE
ENTRANCE OF THE CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER
Sometimes when you’re not looking he just sneaks up on you. He looks like a cheap sort of flying saucer about five feet across with a snout-like megaphone apparatus in the front with two big eyes mounted like Appletons with miniature motorized frowning chrome eyebrows over them. Along the side of his disc-like body are several sets of stupid looking headers and exhaust hoses which apparently propel him and punctuate his dialogue with horrible smelling smoke rings. In the middle of his head we can see an airport wind sock and constantly twirling anemometer. The bottom of him has a landing light and three spoked wheels. In spite of all this, it is obvious that the way he really gets around is by being dangled from place to place by a union guy with a dark green shirt up in the roof who is eating a sandwich (pieces of which drop off every once in a while and lodge themselves near the hole where they put the oil in that makes the cheap smoke). He hovers into view and speaks to us thusly…
CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER:
This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER…it is my responsibility to enforce all the laws that haven’t been passed yet. It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of you to the potential consequences of various ordinary everyday activities you might be performing which could eventually lead to The Death Penalty (or affect your parents’ credit rating). Our criminal institutions are full of little creeps like you who do wrong things…and many of them were driven to these crimes by a horrible force called MUSICReport
Do Not Want. Dislike the layout, hate DISQUS with a passion. At least you can finally nest comments properly, now if you could just see just the new ones somehow with limited context that’d be almost functional.
I’m not the target audience though, so whatevs.Report
The move to Disqus was scrapped because Erik is awesome and figured out how to fix the problem that was going to force us to use Disqus.Report
Testing under the old systemReport
Does that mean it’s going to be stuck to being limited to 5 levels of nesting with bizarro formatting? At least DISQUS gets that mostly right.
Still want a decent “mark read/read new” feature. I hate having to scan 100s of comments to see what’s been posted recently.
And the target audience to answer another question is people who comment here much more than I.Report
I mourn the ability to edit my errors.
But the ability to nefariously change what’s been said is also not a good thing in productive discussion.Report
DISQUS has already been DISMISD, you are commenting using the old reinstated commenting setup.
Who is the target audience?Report
At the risk of sounding like one of those people who complains every time Facebook changes something, but I preferred the old site better. It’s harder to find the main-page (as opposed to sub-blog) articles this way, and the setup doesn’t show that some of the subblogs have been inactive for a long while (at least, Journeys in Alterity was until recently).
I understand the name change, but don’t like it. Due to being aware of the literary reference implicit in “The League of Ordinary Gentlemen”, I had no issues with its appearance of male-specificness (the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen included at least one lady, anyway). I liked the multiple ideas expressed by the title: that we were ‘ordinary’ and made no claim to being the definitive experts on any issue; that we believed in a ‘gentlemanlike’, i.e. polite and courteous and thoughtful standard of discussion; plus the aforementioned literary reference.
I don’t think the present times are ordinary – few times are – and the current title is simply less interesting than the previous one. However, if the earlier one genuinely was keeping women away from the site (which I’m skeptical on), and the name change brings more female posters and front-pagers, the name change will be worth it.Report
Katherine, to your points:
1) Many women did not have a problem with the old name; some did. We have no way of knowing the full extent, but we have plenty of first-hand instances of where it’s been problematic. I liked the old name, but there were good reasons to switch.
2) No, these aren’t ordinary times. There’s some irony at work here, and that’s intentional.
3) I do appreciate the feedback and dissent. We didn’t expect everyone to like the change. When does everyone ever like change?Report
I liked the old name, too.
But the new name is a bit more welcoming. I like it very much, a true gesture of gentlemanly respect.Report
As an additional note, I don’t think the topic tag for “The League” should be “US politics”. There’s a lot more range here than that.
Oh, and while we’re changing things – is there a way that the commenting system can be changed to allow people to edit their comments?Report
i dont know if i am just being stupid or what but did off-the-cuff go bye bye? if so i will mourn for the loss of the LOOG’s snack-size offerings.Report
YesReport
Don’t worry, Russell. We’ll still have snacked-size offerings. They’ll just be intermingled with the entrees, rather than set off to the side.Report
I can’t find my Jacob’s Room thread. Where are non-recent posts kept? And could you please darken the lines around comments? There’s so much white space it hurts my eyes.
I wish there had been some advance notice given.Report
Not sure about how to find the non-recent posts by index, but if you paste this into Google it should turn it up:
site:ordinary=gentlemen.com [Jacob’s Room]Report
How’s this? We’ll re-kick off.Report
DRS – You can find threads several ways. Click on the Sub-Blog/Category on the front page and you’ll see all those posts. Or you can look at the Contributors box in the right sidebar or the Archives box in the footer.Report
Tried both ways, Erik. Jay posted the Jacob’s Room post and it’s not under his name. Also I don’t see anything labeled Sub-Blog/Category on the front page. I even searched under “sub” on my Edit function.Report
It’s under Guest Authors.Report
And where is Guest Authors?Report
(On the right, there’s a pulldown. Contributors past and present.)Report
Thanks, I found it.Report
I dunno, things *look* really great, but I hate this slideshow-ish article browser on the front page. The previous linear presentation worked, as scrolling is fast with a mouse wheel, and thus I could quickly discover which articles I wanted to read. Now it is tedious and slow and horrible. I cannot scan. I have to click and wait for some dumb special effects that are lame the first time I see them and surely will not seem less lame the 10,000th time I’ve seen them. Barf!
Who thought that was a good idea?Report
Veronica, this is totally OT to your comment, but I just had to let you know that you have one of the coolest nom de internets I have ever seen. Even better if that is your IRL handle.
Carry on…Report
Thanks.Report
I need to second Veronica’s point.
First, I love change. Really I do.
Second, this new format does a great job of promoting the sub blogs. Big thumbs up.
What I really, really miss though is the ability to skim the first few paragraphs of a lead essay on the main blog to see whether it is worthy of further time. You simply do not get this from a title or subheading.
As we fix the various minor things that a major transition requires, please do not crop the initial paragraphs of main posts. It is a big mistake, especially if we want to attract new readers.
Anyone else agree?Report
Yes, Roger, I totally agree. I knew where to find the subblogs I found interesting and could ignore the rest. This front page gives me a headache every time I see it. I’m here for the main blog. And there’s no way to find older posts easily. I don’t always remember who originally posted something. So rather than an easy “Older Posts” button at the bottom of the page, like before, now I have to look in a variety of places.
Did we know this was going to happen? Or is this another of the insider-only things?Report
There have been a handful of discussions in various comments to various posts (for example, we got into the whole issue of whether “Ordinary Gentlemen” was a deliberately exclusionary name for a website or not).
I think that there were a bunch of folks who all knew that this was coming (but so soon?) and its inevitability made talking about it less interesting.Report
I wish we could see more recent comments. When multiple threads have active conversations the comments come fast and it seems easy to miss a piece of the conversation as it is now. Before the sub-blogs and main blog had separate areas to see the recent comments so that made it easier to keep up with busy threads.Report
I noticed that too, and made a request to have the GoG real-estate expanded downwards so as to display more comments at a whack. Not sure if it will be possible though.Report
Looks great Erik! The name will take a little getting used to but I understand why the change needed to happenReport
I think the new design is horrible to look at and difficult to navigate. I doubt that a name change will result in increased female contribution. My experience with websites and blogs that deal in serious public policy, politics and social criticism are conspicuously devoid of female contributors. I have no way of knowing if they are readers perhaps you have data that I do not. Will the name change be more welcoming to women? Who knows… I think you will have to discuss issues that interest them. A name change is a superficial gesture and likely will only succeed in making making its creator feel good.Report
The mobile version seems to display the entire articles from the main page. You have to scroll (and scroll and scroll and scroll) passed the Jenny McCarthy article to see anything else.Report
testReport
testingReport
love the interplay with regulars.
can any libertarians weigh in on why the public cannot view the recent Warren/Cramer video? CNBC has taken down the clip, and are we better for that? Does not Warren have some rights over content? Does the ability to censor depend on deep pockets? I know I am out of place here but please send me somewhere.Report
Wait, what? Lemme google…
Well, I’d say that this is yet another example of “real” journalism failing and I’m glad that we have independent journalists out there catching this stuff.Report
Testing comment functionalityReport
Comments still don’t retain the name and e-mail address.Report
Might this be a cookie setting on your end?Report
Now that I’ve played with the site some more, here are some of my observations and concerns:
1. It’s taking a long time to load pages.
2. There seem to be too many images or graphics, and the front page of the blog seems too “busy” for my eyes. It has an off-putting effect, at least for me.
3. My name and email aren’t saved, so I have to sign in each time. It might be a cookie issue on my end, but this problem didn’t occur with the older site.
4. Some posts seem to have lost their comments.
5. Off the cuff seems to be missing. I’ve read someone above who says the off the cuff things will be in the main list of posts. But if it’s not in a side bar, it’s not really off the cuff.
6. I agree with Roger above that it’s helpful to be able to scan a couple paragraphs of a post to know whether it’s worth reading. This is especially important because the pages take a long time to load.
7. I recommend doing away with the “featured articles.” It’s distracting.
8. I used to like the idea of sub-blogs being quasi-autonomous, but putting them on the front page at least gives the appearance of the sub-blogs being just another set of posts (I don’t like calling them “articles”) in the mix.
I realize these are all complaints (and I’m one to complain regardless whenever there’s a format change), but it’s not really clear to me how much of this change was necessary all at once. Maybe it would have been better to focus on a few small changes and see how they pan out. (Or maybe not….perhaps making only small changes forecloses the possibilities of future changes….I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to computers.)Report
I hope Erik doesn’t mind me jumping in, but these are the ones I know about:
> 1. It’s taking a long time to load pages.
Have you been seeing this since the redesign, or just today? There’s been something weird going on with the server today (though it seems better now), so if it’s only been bad today, it’s unrelated and may be fixed.
> 4. Some posts seem to have lost their comments.
When posts were moved from the sub-blogs to the main blog, the comments didn’t come with them.
> 5. Off the cuff seems to be missing.
Off the cuff ist kaput.Report
Now that I’ve re-read my comment, I realize how whine-y it was (especially the passive aggressive aside about calling posts “articles”….if I want to call them “posts,” there’s nothing stopping me).
I do want to repeat how much I enjoy this site and that I would like to donate, in the near future, at least a little to its upkeep.Report
Thanks, Pierre. I won’t lie, I did find some of the criticism a bit over the top at least in *tone* but I can shrug that off. It’s a sign of people enjoying something and not liking to see it changed. I hope you like this format better. Re: posts and articles, I think it just depends. We hope to get more *articles* for the featured stuff while keeping the majority of the stuff here firmly in *post* territory.Report