After 2.5 years with the same design, I’m looking to do an upgrade to WUWT to give it more modern features. I’ve got some professional help involved to do this. It will be a complete rework from the ground up with a new theme
I’ll be staying with wordpress.com as a host, since it solves all my bandwidth and DDoS attack issue with ease. That means I won’t be able to do wordpress plugins, such as a comment edit/preview feature that everyone asks about. I wish I could, but the security outweighs the convenience.
One thing I do plan is a way to keep the most viewed/discussed stories available on top longer. Some days they scroll off too fast when there’s a lot of news.
That said, I’m open to suggestions. Feel free to drop suggestions in comments.
Tell me what you want to keep, tell me what you want changed or improved. Brainstorm ideas. After all, its a community blog, so I value the input.
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Hi Anthony
Would it be fairly easy to have a seperate tab for popular articles (along the lines of Tips & Notes), and retain the current chronological order everyone is used to?
Andi
It would be nice to have a way to indicate agreement or disagreement with a comment. Perhaps a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” button or icon.
I can probably handle anything WordPress does except make the interface a big morass of Javascript. I maintain http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html by reading URLs like http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/01/ to get the posts of that day and the comments made. At least, I think that’s what I do, I haven’t had to look at that code in over a year.
Hotair.com has a two column format where the right column scrolls down with every new post going on top. Posts that have some reason to stay up longer get moved to the left column where they scroll down slower.
That seems to work well. If I want to read everything then I look to the right. If I want only the more interesting posts then I look left.
Anthony,
I am sad to hear the upgrade bug has bitten you. I love the site just as is. But if you must do changes, please keep it simple as you can. It is the words — the facts — here that matter and not the “look and feel”.
One man’s opinion; worth every penny you paid for it. 🙂
Anthony – please keep your font and font size, and your simple clean layout.
Disagree with Roger Sowell. People who disagree or want to say “me too” should do so in words, not by waving arms.
When I want to look at some of the items low on the list of “Reference Pages”, the topic line has to be right at the top of the page, or else I can’t get to the bottom items. So, I have to scroll the topics up, and then move my cursor down to the item. Would it be possible to have the items in a double column, rather than single?
“.. more modern features”
More features that are modern, or features that are more modern? 😉
Either way, I hope you don’t lose the simplicity
Any chance of getting rid of the html requirement, and substituting the highlight and click (for bold, italics etc) feature? Apart from being clunky and slow, the manual html seems to cause a lot of formatting errors when users make an accidental error.
I think that linking replies to comments would be useful.
I agree with markstoval (12:10 p.m.)
Personally, I would read everything up here, whatever the format. I regularly go to:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/
which is probably the worst laid out site of all time but the content is well worth it.
This means it doesn’t matter how I feel so do whatever you consider serves the needs of the site and the message!
Best wishes from the UK.
In the comments section it is very helpful to have reply comments embedded (and indented) so that you can follow the thread of a discussion rather than having to scroll down to see @so-and-so or so-and-so says with the reply.
I also think the right side is too long (TMI). Perhaps link buttons like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Blogs, Publications etc and you can click to see them rather than having them all listed.
Maybe too many links on the top menu bar (under the graphic) as well.
A picture of A Watts on the top right-hand side would personalize the site a bit more. After all he’s a pretty good looking guy 😉
The information and discussion on this site is still the key to me (and it’s great) so keep up the great work.
Anthony
I get the feeling that the number of articles carried in any one week has increased over the years. This means that an article that is just getting into its stride with comments is suddenly bumped down the list when a new one is listed and as a result the number of comments drops as people swarm over to the new article.
As a consequence i feel that the breadth and depth of discussion has , on the whole, diminished.
Would it be possible to run fewer stories or alternatively design the site so that the last five articles are all featured prominently in ‘top’ position?
Tonyb
I agree with Tallbloke. Please do not add “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” icons. It discourages thinking and reduces the quality of the discussion.
I like the format of the site quite well as it is. The only thing that I find difficult is searching through the mountains of posts to find something that I read previously and would like to refer to again.
Doug says:
September 2, 2012 at 12:15 pm
When I want to look at some of the items low on the list of “Reference Pages”, the topic line has to be right at the top of the page, or else I can’t get to the bottom items. So, I have to scroll the topics up, and then move my cursor down to the item. Would it be possible to have the items in a double column, rather than single?
=========================
I used to do the same thing, until I discovered that leaving the cursor positioned anywhere over the list of topics, and then scroll with the mouse wheel to show the bottom items.
Did that make sense ?
I understand there will be built in limits. One feature I’d like to see is the ability to search for comments made by an idividual across post. ” F” will find words in a particular post but it would be nice to search across post.
(I’ve made comments that I’d like to recall that are now archived but don’t remember when I made them.)
Another feature might be the ability to mark a comment as “read/unread”. Sometimes when a post becomes “hot”, loading all the comments bogs things down for those of that are still using hammers and chisels.
” F”
That should be “Contol key “F”‘
That shout be “Contol key “F”‘
AHHHHHHHH!
“Shout” should be “should”.
PS How about “spell check”?
Never change a winning website….
I am quite happy with the site layout and don’t really need any radical changes, the only thing I would really like to see improved is the discussion. It would be really nice if it was possible to respond to a particular comment rather than to add yet another comment downstream … and subsequently for the commenter to see instantly who replied. What I would like best is if “root comments” were always visible and replies/discussion to them was hidden initially with an option to show them per comment, similarly how it’s done e.g. on this site:
http://www.zive.cz/clanky/zpravy-a-tyden-zive-hromada-stroju-s-windows-8/sc-3-a-165233/default.aspx?artcomments=1
(sorry it’s in czech, I don’t know about any english example; you can unroll discussion to each comment by clicking on “odpovědi” below the comment)
… but I’m afraid it won’t be possible given the WordPress constraints.
Remove the “Recent Comments” section from the sidebar. It pollutes Google search results of WUWT with multiple entries.
Tonyb wrote:
Agreed, but moderating all those discussions must be burdensome.
Why not have a separate unmoderated forum (perhaps even on a separate site) for people to continue discussions? That is, after a few days, comments are closed for each article and a link is provided to the relevant section in the forum.
Ain’t that the truth.
On the other hand, Drudge’s cutting edge design is good for 900,000,000 or so hits a month.
On the gripping hand, a ton of horrible javascript & maybe a big flash intro would keep jerks like me away. 😉
My only recommendation is to avoid big bang changes. My long time standard recommendation is to introduce new features one or two at a time so you can gauge the reaction to each one of them accurately. If you throw twenty new things in all at once, the comments both good and bad simply get lost in the noise. I also find that if you throw too much change in all at once, excellent new features may not get explored at all by the users and fall to the wayside because other new features, particularly the bad ones, are grabbing all the attention.
Clean and simple for people without university bandwidth. You have a great site here, content is king. So add a ‘thumbs down’ on commenter thumb ratings. 🙂
All that said, an index or extended TOC feature might be welcomed.