Haydain Neale, 1970–2009
The Lee's Palace Mural is Dead! Long Live the Lee's Palace Mural!
Peeve Patrol
Third Floor, First Rate
Polling Booth: "Kick a Ginger" Controversy
It's been months in the making, but we've finally got our fancy-dancy new layout. Thanks to Neil and the rest of the Gothamist crew for hooking us up!
You may have also noticed that we're also rocking a brand new shade of blue. We considered using royal blue for a while, which we liked for aesthetic reasons and symbolic ones: it's not only "the color of royalty to welcome the coming of a King," but can "symbolize the night sky in which the star appeared to announce the birth of Jesus," and is "the colour of Satan." (Thanks Wikipedia!). We tried darker shades of blue, too, but, in the end, nothing suited our content and sidebar better than this lovely, peaceful colour (#B4D2F5, colour nerds), close to periwinkle blue, and a hell of a lot prettier than our old light blues. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that, until about 1500, "periwinkle" meant "the most excellent of a specified group or category; the paragon of a specified quality." It's no King/Jesus/Satan, but we can deal with that.
Please bear with us as we mess around with the site to make everything work with the new layout. Understandably, there are quite a few bugs with the huge site redesign, and we're getting on them immediately. If you spot any problems, however minor, please let us know in the comments. And, of course, tell us what you think! Just for comparison, here's what our old layout looked like. Needless to say, it was about time for a change.
Keep your eyes glued to Torontoist over the next few weeks -- we've got all sorts of goodies in store in time for the new year.
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Number one priority is completely cleaning up/redesigning/organizing the sidebar. Once that's done, I'll move onto the rest.
Unlike with Eye Weekly, your redesign heralds an increase in news coverage, correct?
Perhaps...or, at the very least, an increase in awesomeness. There's a lot to fix, though. Today (tomorrow?) will be a very long day. But hey, I'm doing the news roundup in the morning!
Hi guys
Could someone keep an eye on Bloglines? Certain (but not all) Torontoist posts seem to get updated over and over again even though there seems to be no new content. Maybe the new layout will address some of this.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
hey, awesome use of the word "understandably".
i like the new color.
later
If the cover songs post showed up as new in Bloglines, it's because I modified it last night to suit the new layout. I believe you can set Bloglines (and other RSS readers) to ignore changes in already-read posts. Otherwise, you might get posts marked as new every time a spelling, layout, or grammatical error is corrected.
Actually, I don't think the RSS issue has been fixed, since I still see some of my posts updating, when I have, in fact, not touched them. Turning on the 'ignore changes' is good as a short term solution, but hopefully we can get this fixed permanently soon! We're just as frustrated. :)
the RSS issue is Bloglines related. We haven't had any reports from anyone else using any other RSS software hasn't complained. We've put in an email to Bloglines tech, cause I'm quite sure it's something on their end. It's quite possible that other RSS readers just have the ignore set by default.
Thanks for following up guys. I like having the updated post feature on because sometimes posts get corrected or whatever - I see this happen on BlogTO too sometimes. I'll just have to suck it up :)
Dudn't look so hot in Safari or Firefox for me.
The ad bar on the left is periwinkle, but other than that there's an inch and a half of blue at the top before the entire thing fades to white for the rest of the page all the way down.
Bunch of boxes (top links box for one) are partially cut off.
I'm working on hacking the sidebar right now, so that might be the reason.
Isn't the recommended number of characters in a column of text ideally no more than 80? The main column is 100 characters wide, give or take a few l's or i's.
The Most Recommended/Most Commented thing splashed across the top is really out of place. It extends beyond the width of the column.
Maybe it's Firefox?
Safari and Firefox on the Mac seem to be displaying everything OK, even when text is resized. It's a little wonky as the page loads, but then it snaps into place.
Cool. The baby blue is neat, but I don't notice too much major improvement.
The RSS problem on Torontoist seems to be tied into the changing of advertising banners. I was subscribed for a long time but every time and just quit out of frustration. Then with bloglines I resubscribed to give it another show and found that it seemed that when an AD was changed, the post would pop up again. I used the bloglines "ignore" solution to stop the constant updating, but as someone else mentioned, it's nice to have it work when the post is *actually* updated.
Keep the input coming, everyone. I'm still going through it and fixing everything I can. The left sidebar's going to be trimmed down substantially by the end of the day, and I'm going to keep trying to fix everything else you've all suggested.
I'd also prefer it if the main column wasn't so wide. It was too wide this morning, but I'm not sure if it's better now?
It's probably still the same width. Unfortunately, we can't change the column width -- Gothamist has set it Ist-wide. If they decide to change it, though, we'll get in changed too.
Looks cleaner, easier to read :)
Page width is making me feel like typewriterhead :(
No problem. I really love it otherwise though. Considering how much stuff you pack onto a page, it's been streamlined pretty well. I've never noticed too much before, but the font seems easier to read too. Thanks, guys!
We're going to unpack the page a bit, too, Gloria, moving some items to sub-pages. That "Navigate" box will be the new best way to get around on the site.
I saw this in the morning and it was all blue, now with the fade to white I like it more. It feels fresher and cleaner, it has more visual structure.
My only concern with the design is that there's no 'barrier' on the right that stops the eye 'falling off' that way. The wide ad at the top, which is visually wider than the content column, exaggerates that feeling as it pulls the eye further out.
Is the bulk of the page supposed to be white? Cuz 95% of it in mine is all white, minus the sidebar banner dealie and the fade on the top, and alternating comments.
Don't know if I like the white, feels odd, if I'm getting whats supposed to be got.
And the "Most Recommended/Commented" box is still jutting pure white sharply into the blue fade.
Running Safari on OSX.
I think you used to have an events calendar ... is that still here? I can't seem to find it ....
Gloria, we got rid of that plugin over the summer. :)
The article titles are SO BIG!