Haydain Neale, 1970–2009
Transit City and Transit Cities
Peeve Patrol
Newsstand: November 23, 2009
The Making of a Medley
Oh hey! We have a new layout now. It's a little different than the one we've had for the last two years, but we think you'll like it. As our publisher Jake Dobkin put it on Gothamist:
The goal of the new design was to make our...content easier to read, and to make the site as a whole easier to use. The content area is now better visually defined (with borders!) and we've moved all the important site functionality to the top of the page, where it should be easier to find. Additionally, we've migrated Gothamist to the newest Movable Type software. That should make the site faster and more stable, and allow us to add new features over the next year. A big and well-earned thanks is due to Neil, who has been working on this relaunch for several months, and to our friends at Six Apart Services, who assisted him on the project.All of those things are true. But while the layout is new and improved it's not entirely finished just yet. There are still a few things that aren't as they will be or ought to be--the exact colour palette may not be the one we end up sticking with, there are a few broken links and broken features, and for some reason em dashes and en dashes currently show up as hyphens in posts which is really the worst thing of all--but take some time, explore, and then do let us know what you think and what you'd improve or tweak in the (much improved) comments section that accompanies this post. And yeah, comments finally work again, too, so feel free to continue debating this past year's heroes and villains, too.
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You should be able to comment below...
And you can also reply directly to comments, and then MT automagically makes them all threaded and pretty and stuff.
Testing...
Test-ho!
Ooooh, looky.
Automagic!
The problem with
Threaded comments is
You eventually start
running out of
...room
Now my uber long post replying to this dipshit above me will look really uber funny. Especially when it's a paragraph of lorem...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer velit. Proin ut lorem. Nullam sagittis lacus id ligula. Sed ac diam. Fusce hendrerit gravida massa. Donec vitae nulla nec ipsum facilisis scelerisque. Donec consectetur eros at diam. Sed tellus. Ut id turpis. Suspendisse potenti. Phasellus arcu ipsum, hendrerit in, ornare viverra, laoreet laoreet, sem. Vestibulum orci nibh, gravida eu, venenatis ac, vestibulum in, metus. Quisque gravida nibh eu dolor. Ut varius. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
And you can also totally ignore previous comments and just post a new, non-threaded one, too.
Hmm. Something on the page seems to be eating my CPU. Could it be the "Our Cities" thing with its superfluous fade-in/fade-out ticker effect? This is with a December 15 nightly build of Seamonkey 2.0a3pre.
I look forward to seeing how the new threading works out in practice — it seems like a good implementation, and so many sites get it so terribly wrong.
And I can reproduce it with today's build, too — in full, “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081229 SeaMonkey/2.0a3pre”. This is on Linux; I'll see what a Windows release and the Mozilla-derived browser on the Nokia N800 make of it when I get home.
I get the same thing with Firefox 3 on Windows XP.
Same here. My CPU is at 100% and the fan just went on in my MacBook (Safari 3.2.1).
Today, now that the "Our Cities" menu isn't constantly animated, things are back to normal. The "roll-up" animation on the Full/Summary menu is pretty sluggish and glitchy, and seems superfluous, but at least I can avoid triggering it. Paul Kishimoto is right about the live preview update being another trouble spot — could it be put on a timer, and only update every 2–5 seconds?
running out of
Just showing you the suckiness that is threaded commenting above.
I've always loved threaded conversations, but they have no place in the real world unfortunately :(
Every time I've tried to deploy a site with commenting like this, within a month the client will come back asking us to remove it :(
I'm not sure if they still do it, but Digg had a limited-depth threading system wherein each comment could have replies, but replies couldn't themselves have replies.
Like this. So you could still reply to something from hours ago without derailing the flow of the more recent discussion, but each post didn't metastasize into its own little newsgroup.
In theory it could work, hopefully toist users are savvy enough to understand this. I would think so, but I gave up giving interweb users the benefit of the doubt years ago.
I for one, welcome our new layout overlords.
Looks great....except I'm not too sure if I'm that big a fan of the comments section - the trees get skinnier and skinnier - to the point that some only have three or four characters per line. That makes it difficult to read!
That happens (as it did above) if there's a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply—but if comments are only a few threads deep it seems to not be a problem. We're going to look into it, and see what we can do.
I'm sure it can always be reverted at a later date. The only thing you can really do is play the waiting game to see how people use it. If it becomes a problem, revert to flat comments, if not, keep it up! Makes following a convo much easier if it can be used properly.
Very strange decision in terms of width I must add. 855 pixels? I'm lost on that one.
1024 pixels (min resolution) - 17 pixels (IE scrollbar) = 1007 pixels wide. You've lost almost 200 pixels for no (apparent) reason.
Strange.
Oh, for a completely fluid layout. Some people insist that fixed-width layouts are for the reader's own good, because long lines of text are hard to read. That's what zoom levels and resizing your browser window are for, I say.
And where does a fixed width of 855 pixels leave devices with screens smaller than that?
I have to agree with torontothegreat about threaded comments.
I think the best implementation of threading I've seen so far is on Slashdot; each layer of comments gets a thickish border on both sides with a white space between them. It gives a visual cue on the depth of threading ("...three borders, four borders, two...") without eating as much space as the fat 50px indents here.
The page seems sluggish to me, too—maybe it's this comment preview regenerating itself on every keystroke, even arrow keys?
Aside from the threaded comments, I think the new layout looks great.
Oh lawd I didn't view source
I just noticed the beauty that is fluid from my handheld
Bravo on that choice! People are just so afraid of fluid design (too much of a challenge for them IMO)
Btw FF 3/XP no lag. Eric if you're using FF and can replicate use yslow FF debugger to see/report the bottleneck
Having forgotten what minuscule amount I once might have known web site design, a list of minor suggestions:
- threading is unpleasant; some alternatives were mentioned and generally some sort of hide/expand feature or subtler tabs would be good
- the bar created by user avatars is pretty empty so why not throw the "reply, date, report this" line under usernames?
- some of the thumbnails on the header (i.e. next to the torontoist logo) are distorted
- I really dislike that 'tag' icon, irrationally so
Really hate the new layout.
Where's the side list of new comments?
Threading means it's harder to tell which comments are new since the last time you read.
Never mind the side comment thing, it wasn't showing until after I hit submit. Though that might also be a problem.
The side list is comin' back; it's been on and off intermittently as tech stuff is happening in the background.