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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kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
September 2, 2012 at 4:00 pm
“I just upgraded Debian on two laptops and a PC. The entire Debian distribution is available for about $15 for an 8-DVD set from assorted vendors, ”
Debian is always 2 years behind the curve. I would currently recommend Ubuntu for normal users.
Debian has silly issues with Firefox. The Firefox logo is copyrighted but cost-free; this violates Debian’s “everything must be free” dogma so they forked the project and call their browser IceWeazel.
And Debby and Ian are no more together.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
September 2, 2012 at 4:37 pm
“Too bad you can’t make advertizing dollars like Lubos does.”
Do you use an ad blocker? WUWT has google ads between the article and the comments.
If possible, I think some form of nested comments would be amazing. Much easier to follow multi-commented discussions.
Anthony,
I like the current format of WUWT. I have often used it as an example to others for how an effective website should look.
However, if you absolutely must make changes please keep the following in mind:
1) Please don’t reduce the font size. Some of us with older eyes have a much harder time seeing small detail.
2) Please don’t add more columns. More columns simply means that I have to scroll further down to read the articles or you have to reduce to font size to fit more words in the same space.
3) Please keep the background white. Using images for backgrounds is the number one reason that I cannot read certain websites. I use the net to gather information. If I have to slow down and slough through a website to read it, I will get my info elsewhere.
4) Please keep the chronological layout of the main page. Do not add more than 1 or 2 pinned articles as the top items. When I visit your site, I expect to see the newest items at the top. If I refresh the page and do not see a newer article at the top, I assume that nothing has been added. This means I occasionally miss newly posted articles. If you pin more articles as “top articles,” I will have to scroll down every time I refresh to see if there is something new. In this case I will most likely stop reading WUWT very frequently.
Minor changes I would like to see:
1) Thumbs up/thumbs down voting on comments. I have often wanted to agree (or disagree) with a comment, but did not wish to pollute the comment stream with an additional “me too” type of useless comment.
2) Add a “reply to” to the comments. This would save the hassle of having to cut and paste other peoples comments before replying to them. It would also keep comment strings together and not sprinkled throughout the other comments. This would add a lot of readability.
3) Add a “see more” feature to the comments. This would initially limit long comments to 5-10 lines and allow full viewing if the reader is interested.
Thank you for the opportunity to give my feedback as you decide on potential changes. The community here at WUWT is a very important part of the readers’ experience.
Respectfully,
wermet
It is hard to deal with this site if you don’t read it every day. “Recent Posts” should be shorter and near the top, followed by a link to an Archive index… a page which begins a reverse chron index of all posts.
If I’m gone for a week, it seems that I have to keep hitting the link to the previous story until I reach familiar ground… one article at a time. Usually I want to read all articles, but it’s a pain getting back somewhere so one can follow the interwoven activity. (Or to find a story that one saw sometime in the past month.)
John S says:
September 2, 2012 at 4:12 pm
“I’ll repeat what others have asked for: My number one request is to have a preview function for posting with HTML.
Anthony Watts says:
September 2, 2012 at 4:16 pm
“yes and the preview html function is the one item I said at the beginning we couldn’t have due to plug in requirements”
Perhaps a button that displays the message “Why didn’t you read what I already posted, dumb ass” would be appropriate.
Is it possible to add a sequence number to each post? I have seen it elsewhere but can’t think of the blog at present. This also helps with referring to previous posts, you can simply say Boris Badenov (#33) says…, and it allows you do quickly scroll to roughly where the post is.
Not much else needs changing. If it ain’t broke…
Anthony,
please keep the current general design, its so easy to read!
Many of the other sites that have “updated” are now significantly more difficult to read – or have confusing fonts. Take Jo Nova – great content, but bolded words can actually be smaller, highlighted live links come up light brown, and diagram legends can be 6 point or smaller!. The old Jo Nova layout was much easier to read.
u.k.(us): Not only did it make sense, it worked! Thanks!
My only issue is one that has caused me to stop bothering to read comments. You get far too many responses to keep up with everything. The only answer is some sort of filtering when viewers look at comments.
The like/dislike type of feature has some weaknesses, as others have mentioned. One way to address those weaknesses is to only have moderators do the voting.
Another entirely different approach is to have moderators do some sort of categorizing of the responses. Such categories might be “Additional technical discussion”, “Expressing outrage at the misbehavior”, “Saying thanks for sharing that”, etc.
To prevent this from being a burden on your moderators, it needs a simple method of categorizing the comments, such as a set of “approve” buttons, each with a category.,
Joe Dunfee
Adding a Date to the Recent Posts and having some kind of last week, week before type navigation would be helpful. Also if the ‘search’ could have a qualifier so indicate that you are searching on coments or searching on the Post and allows a not-before date and have a Google like search (mandiroty word/phrase, oeional word prhase) then the site would be more useful as a reference.
I am not sure you r sill listening Anthony… but don’t change a thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, and please don’t make the face any smaller, serif, or even more gray. Judith’s site is hard on the eyes due to all of these factors even at ‘large font’ and at 175% zoom. I noticed others have requested the same in thier comments, and I agree. Others can reduce it to 75% if they have excellent eyes (so far) and like compact text. I think we all too used to be that way before the many years of staring at a monitor!
Oops Anthony, meant ‘petite’ or ‘fine’ serif. The face here is fine.
vukcevic says:
September 2, 2012 at 2:31 pm
if ain’t broke don’t fix it !
==========================================
Yes, I agree 100%.
I read somewhere that (Quote: “Normal people believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it;
Engineers believe if it ain’t broke then it doesn’t have enough features”)
I’ve seen more than one web site turned to FUBAR.
Please leave everything alone as no changes are needed!
Make a blog that works like http://www.freerepublic.com does, where users can view their ‘pings’ or activity (and others activity too) at the click of a mouse button … but I know that will never happen nonetheless I wish it could!
.
Two More …
VOTING :: Some of the posters may not have been here but one year ago comment voting was tried here and it was murder on usability, dragging down page loads and adding vertical space to each comment so the thread actually became physically longer. It also takes away something from the professional appearance with added clutter. Jump between JoNova and WUWT to see the difference. This one is better left dead IMHO.
SUGGESTION :: Apropos of what someone else said, you may want to design separate CSS styles to be used on the top post to help differentiate between what you write and what the author of the article writes. For example a style with italics and a certain font and color for your intro called ‘Anthony’. Another one with different elements called ‘Article’. Then you just wrap HTML tags around the two sections like so …
<DIV CLASS=”Anthony”>Your intro text here</DIV>
<DIV CLASS=”Article”>Posted article here</DIV>
A thumbs up/down would help along with the option to rank by user feedback. However that tends to weight the first comments much higher than later ones.
I like detailed categories to help find similar articles.
Lengthen the number of top posts eg from 5 to 10.
Interested in double columns. When composing a response, I often have to scroll back quite a way, find an author, copy an extract, scroll back down to ‘leave a reply’ paste it, repeat for another quote from another blogger. Lots of time spent scrolling and visual searching with the reply box open and part finished.
Australian government is talking about getting more and more intrusive, censorship, etc. If your silo can be hardened, that would be good.
Don’t change your system for no good reason. What features do you look to gain? If you have good reason to change, dump wordpress. Consider moveable type.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with moveable type, but I know wordpress sucks, blogspot is limited, and Perl is best scripting language in the world.
From u.k.(us) on September 2, 2012 at 12:41 pm:
To fix the same problem I have with the “Reference Pages” tab?
Not if you don’t have a mouse wheel on your laptop! And there are still mice out there without scroll wheels.
But now that you mention it, this old ThinkPad has both the red pointer stick button (which I use) and the touchpad (which annoys me) for mouse-like functions. Under Debian, the right edge of the touchpad has a scroll wheel-like function. Tried it, works like you said.
However, this machine was set up for dual-boot “just in case” with an XP partition. (Came with the COA sticker. Rarely use it.) XP doesn’t give me any scrolling function.
Suggestion:
A two-column “front page” article format with one column showing the blogged articles in reverse chronological order and the second showing articles with recent comments.
Active discussions relating to older postings then maintain “equal” priority with new ones. If things are “slow”, then articles will appear close to each other in both columns — there some more thinking about the value of eliminating/”compressing” those “duplicates”. My personal thinking is that people will scan either one column or the other so an optimisation will lead to some people failing to see articles. But then I’m not a cognitive psychologist. Maybe Lewandoofski has some “input”. 😉
Sticky articles in the header bar above the two columns.
Hsre are my thoughts, for what they’re worth.
1 Nested/Indented Replies – Several blogs I like use this in comment, and it makes it much easier to follow discusion the first time I read a thread… Which is usually also the ONLY time, as it means each time I check for new posts I have to look through the whole thread. So, good for reading a discusion, not so good for HAVING a discusion.
2 Like/Dislike button – I have to agree that this leaves a lot of room for abuse. But having everyone posting to say “I agree with so and so” can really clutter up a thread. What I’ve seen some do is reply to a post they agree with with a “+1” (Judith Curry does this often) What about a +1 button? If you strongly agree with a post, give it your vote. If you strongly disagree, post why.
3 See more button on comment – Oh God Yes! So many rants and manifestos. I would suggest a cut off of about 20 lines, that way you’re not having to “open” every other post. And usually by the first page you can tell if it’s an in depth discusion of a relavent topic or the 30th repeate of the author’s favorite 8 page rant.
As per other comments, the ability to have comments to a particular post indented, such as the format on Forbes blogs.
Agreed. (Or one can quickly “find” “#33”.)
Also, if the site adopts the suggestion of allowing buttons to be clicked to create italics etc. in comments, there should be a button for “block-quoting” (indenting and italicizing). I find the feature improves the comprehensibility of a comment (see above), but it’s a pain to type in the tags at present.