Welcome to the new and improved Feministe. As you can see, we have a lovely new lay-out and a quicker site, thanks to the amazing TigTog at Hoyden About Town. We also have a lovely new and talented blogger, Chally from Zero at the Bone. We’ve added tag clouds on the right-hand side so that you aren’t overwhelmed with a bunch of categories; we’ve also made our archives easier to navigate (just click here). And we hope we’ve made everything prettier and more user-friendly.
But that isn’t all, Feministas. We have two new bloggers for your reading pleasure, who will be introducing themselves in the coming days. I think you’ll all be very pleased and excited when you see who they are.
In the meantime, we would love your feedback about the new site. Is everything working ok? Anything wonky? Anything we took away that you loved? Anything you see on other sites that you’re dying to see here?
Thanks for all of your patience while we get the kinks ironed out, and welcome to the next level of Feministe goodness.
I really liked the way the block quotes were on Feministe in Exile — it’s a small thing, but they stood out more, broke up the text nicely, etc. Love the new site, though!
Ooh, Shiny!
The new version loads a lot faster than the old version.
I’m for it.
Shiny indeed!
It definitely seems to load a bit faster, so that’s a plus. On the other hand, I miss the “previous post” and next “post” links, they were quite handy. (Or maybe I’m just too stupid to find them. This is all so confusing..)
Err, is the search function returning? That was pretty useful.
psst Joel,
The previous and next post links are right below the comment box.
Good catch Sid, I wouldn’t have noticed it was gone until I went to search for something weeks or months from now. The search box is definitely something useful that hopefully will be brought back.
On the new blogroll, I like the little synopses some of the blogs have. It’d be nice to have more of those.
One small thing: A bunch of the individual post comment feeds I have tracked in my RSS reader are now getting what seems to be every comment posted to Feministe. Are we still able to track comments on individual posts or is this just a blip? Thanks!
Also, have you changed the moderation filter? Everything I’ve posted so far has been kicked to the queue.
Is it possible to have nesting comments? It makes conversations easier to follow.
Thanks Grogette, I must be blind.
And even more so for failing to spell Groggette’s name correctly.
Much, much faster loading with fewer hang ups — yaaay! Not sure I’m as enamored of the new format, but I don’t do visual change well. I’m not stumbling blindly around trying to find things, anyway. ;) Not sure about the tags column, either. The very first place I ever saw that format was at icanhazcheesburger, so it’s linked with informal, snarky, “squeeee!” blogging. Then again, this place isn’t always totally serious, so whatever you lot think looks good. ;) I’ll certainly deal.
Quick thoughts:
I’ll miss search one day, but it’s not an everyday thing, or even every month thing.
I’m going to miss the live preview every time I post. It was really helpful, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to preview now, even statically. I’m almost certain to get the HTML tags wrong sometimes.
That said, I suspect the live preview was part of the performance issues this site had, and if so I’m happier with it gone.
I’m also not a fan of the tag cloud. I prefer it when those have a fixed-size font and have the number of entries in parentheses. The variable fonts in inline flow layout makes it hard to scan.
Still, even if you’re going with the font size tag cloud, I think it would be *much* improved with linebreaks between items. The alphabetical ordering is nearly useless when you can’t just look at the first character and many of the tags have multiple words spanning more than one line.
I’m picky. This is sort of what I do for a living :). The new site is much cleaner, easier to look at and read, and much faster.
I’m curious whether the bug’s been fixed where anybody can post with the name, say, Jill, and have the post highlighted as though they were the blogger.
Hope it’s more hack-free than the last system. Punkassblog.com has been hit with the same hack that hit you, and all my attempts to communicate it to them have gone unnoticed.
I have to echo thetroubleis–nested comments are awesome.
Small point: is it possible to have a drop-down for categories? I totally know how annoying it is to get everything you want in the sidebars, but it would be nice to have a navigation option for categories as well as tabs.
Huzzah for the triumphant return!
Moving the next/last post links to the top would make them more usable.
As for nested comments, I find them personally to be aggravating. It makes it almost impossible to come back and pick up a discussion at a later time.
Could you keep the tag cloud but also add the old sk001 categories, maybe in a drop down, as mk suggested? I know some WP templates support using both.
And as mentioned, search function is a biggie.
Love the new site. Works much better than the old one did.
*waves* I took a couple of days away from Feministe and only just realised this thread was happening.
* I’ll tweak the styling of the blockquotes to be a more distinctive break
* search box is an easy add
* so is a drop-down box for the categories (drop-down boxes not as accessible for some readers, but that’s why we now have the separate archives page)
* the current tag cloud template is the default settings – I’ll look into tweaking it.
* I’ll see about adding in an extra set of previous/next post navigation links at the end of the post before the comments start.
lia, re the feeds for individual comments threads – I’ve shifted all our feeds over to Feedburner, because a lot of the traffic that was throttling the blog was coming from bots spidering the feed. I hadn’t fully considered how that would bollix the single-thread comments feeds – I’ll see what I can do. I should also add in a subscribe-to-this-thread-by-email feature, because I remember a few folks liked that over at the back up blog.
Update
- Search box – done.
- Previous/Next post navigation – now just below the post body as well as below the comments submission box.
- Archives page tweaked – it now shows a better list of the top tags than the default sidebar listing, plus a list of the 50 most recent posts, so that if you’re looking for something you read last week you can find it easily.
With the full archives page now enabled, we can remove the tag cloud in the sidebar, and I don’t think we need the category drop-down box there either, because it’s too wide for my sidebar (pout). I’ve added a bit of text below the search box to remind people that they can browse the archives.
Tigtog,
Thanks for the reminder to use the archives link at the top. Duh! I don’t know why I didn’t notice it. And you are correct that drop down boxes aren’t ideal for accessibility reasons.
Just from an aesthetic standpoint, I’m really liking the new site, and especially the new-new sidebars. Nice and clean looking. Well done!
Update the second: lia, I’ve now reinstated the single-thread comments-feeds as they were before. Those feeds weren’t the big culprit on the throttling of the bandwidth, so that should be OK.
P.S. Thanks to everyone with compliments above regarding the site aesthetics. I wanted to change as little as possible from the previous well-beloved design, just making it more accessible and that little bit crisper as well as loading more quickly.
Having the separate archives page and blogroll page are a big part of speeding up the load-times – that’s a metric buttload of database queries now removed from every other pageload because they are no longer in the sidebar (the main thing slowing load-time down now is the javascript in the ads).
WordPress now includes comment threading – you just have to turn it on and add the relevant bits of code to comments. php. That would be useful, so people can reply directly to one another and conversations are easier to follow.