New blog formatting

We needed to update the blog because the old theme was no longer being maintained by WordPress, and we were having security problems and issues with the comment screening. So we replaced it with this new theme which was having some issues. We patched it so now it’s functional, but I’ve been told it isn’t so great on phones.

I just wanted to let you know that we’re working on putting together something that looks a little better, less whitespace, things like that. It’s not as easy as you might think, in particular because we’ve got tons of content that you want to read, also we want to make the commenting experience as easy as possible under the constraints of security and not getting overwhelmed by spam. Thanks for your patience!

29 thoughts on “New blog formatting

  1. It’s terrible, Andrew. I could tell you why. But, I think you should a/b test. Pick some random designs and then gradually work towards a design that your random sampled set is the most satisfied with. (Whatever the new design is, it’s difficult to imagine that it’s worse than this.)

  2. Not and Sam:

    Unfortunately the previous design was no longer available. We need to use a theme that is being maintained and is secure.

    I’m sure the new design will be better than this. For security reasons we wanted to change right away, and the theme we’re using now is available.

    If you or others have particular remarks about problems with the current theme or suggested improvements, feel free to add these in the comments, and I can add them to the current list of issues.

  3. When perusing the comments I’ve always liked the ability to be able to discern the author’s identity relatively quickly. With the new format, unless a name is connected to an email (where it becomes orange highlighted), the commentator name is super tiny relative to the text around it.

    If I have any sway on the new design ideally I’d like to see the names more pronounced

  4. My old eyes aren’t as sensitive to contrast as they used to be, so I find it easier to read things that are black and white, like the black letters that I’m typing now. Once the comment is posted, they will be black on grey, and I will have more trouble reading them. Similarly, the orange letters are a problem, especially on the darker grey background such as your reply to Not and Sam above.

  5. I like this format better than the old one. It looks fine on my phone.

    I like nested comments—that feature helps me keep track of the relationship between the comments.

    Bob76

  6. I would advise you to set a limit on the width of the content area for the main body of the text, so text doesn’t spill out to be endlessly wide. There’s a reason why books are physically longer than they are wide.

  7. Reading these comments, I have the urge to wonder why the world needs to cater to the mobile phone. Frankly, I don’t care what it looks like on a phone – is there something wrong with using a laptop or desktop? Yes, phones can be used on the run, in the waiting room, in the market, etc., but those are hardly the places to promote careful considered reasoning. I feel like phones cater to a twitter mentality, and designing this blog to work on these devices puts it on a slippery slope towards that end.

    I would say that most of the readers of this blog are careful and considered and I expect that would carry over to their use of phones to read the blog. But, over time, I fear that it will invite less considerate readers and may also invite current readers to react more quickly and concisely a la Twitter.

    • Because we only have so many hours in a day and most of the hours spent in front of a laptop or desktop we’re doing what we get paid to do.

      The phone is always in my pocket and I can look at things like this blog any time I have five minutes. Usually away from my desk.

  8. It has gotten better on my phone.

    It loads quite fast.

    Still is a bit hard to read in that it could use more contrast.

    I would suggest limiting the nesting to maybe three levels (maybe you’ve done that already?) – the text box width gets unusably narrow beyond that.

    Is there anyway to get the most recent comments list more easily available on mobile? As it is now it only appears on the main page and only if you scroll all the way to the bottom).

    Would love to have an edit feature as well as formatting options.

    Can you incorporate a way to “remember” identifying info so that name and email don’t need to be entered for every comment? Is there a reason you don’t have that feature (I.e., as you get with a login in most WordPress blog interfaces)?

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